I had lunch with a friend today. A smart friend. And a friend who is asking many important questions about hiring and recruiting. I’m not going to share many more specifics about what he’s working on, but it’s safe to say that as I go through my own job search gauntlet, I really think he’s onto something.
While I’m not sharing more about his ideas, I do want to add to some thoughts which started in a previous post. He and I talked about what I wrote, in conjunction with his thinking, and like most good conversations, we kept building and building until we got to an even better set of notions.
The main conclusion we came to is that the success metrics for hiring are too short-sighted. I understand that. But what if we started tracking hiring statistics differently, focusing more on belonging and retention rather than headcounts and productivity? For the companies I want to be a part of, I feel like they are hiring humans rather than filling a role. And that’s a difference I think we should be talking about more often.
In my past, I’ve definitely been hired because I was the right shape for the hole a company was trying to fill. But when my shape changed, through additional knowledge or new aspirations, the company wasn’t elastic enough to accommodate my new shape. Other times, the shape of the hole I was filling for the company changed, because of a shift in focus or an adjustment in the market landscape, and I didn’t have the capacity to mold to the new structure quickly enough. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The companies I’ve been happiest working for did two important things for me and my coworkers: 1) Invested in us and our continuing education. 2) Created managers who were constantly checking in on our evolving career aspirations, and giving us the freedom to be curious and explore other areas within the company.
Before we get too much farther down this path, I need to do something which I should have also mentioned in my previous post about hiring, and that’s to recognize the immense amount of privilege required to try to do any of this. It’s a privilege to be picky about where you want to work. It’s a privilege to get even one offer. And a privilege to be able to say all of this so openly without worry about how it may change your prospects of even being considered for a role. Right now I have that privilege. And soon (hopefully), I’ll be in a position to start advocating for these changes so that we can get better at getting people into better positions. Now, back to the suggestions.
The other idea I want to see more prevalent in hiring conversations is goals. This can come in many forms, but I think both the employer and employee should have a better understanding of what success looks like after a person is hired. Where should you be in 90 days? What should you have accomplished after six months? Which preparatory training or services will you have access to in order to explore what’s next in your career? These kinds of questions can go a long way in finding out which companies care about you as a person, and which care more about you as a human resource.
And that brings me to my last point. In one way or another, companies will ship their org chart. It’s almost unavoidable, for both companies big and small. So we need to do a better job of designing our organizations. I may be biased, both because I’ve worked on design teams for so long and because my lunch partner today is a brilliant design ops person, but I truly believe that every company needs a designer to help build their organizational framework. If we break it down, it’s just a structure. We design buildings, why can’t we get better at designing teams? If I go on much further about this, though, I’ll quickly get out of my depth. But I know that the teams I have been most productive on, providing the best value to our customers and users, were the ones which had thoughtfully integrated my skills into the entirety of the organization. Doing this well is a smart investment, if only to cut down on the constant recruiting, hiring, and training costs which can arise from doing it poorly.
If we step back and think about this holistically, we need to create more opportunities to hire people, not positions. And account for the fact that people change. When we are flexible enough to account for both those facts, we create enough psychological safety for teams to really innovate and solve problems through their creativity. And isn’t that the whole point?
Spoonman
02 March 2023
Building bridges.
I had lunch with a friend today. A smart friend. And a friend who is asking many important questions about hiring and recruiting. I’m not going to share many more specifics about what he’s working on, but it’s safe to say that as I go through my own job search gauntlet, I really think he’s onto something.
While I’m not sharing more about his ideas, I do want to add to some thoughts which started in a previous post. He and I talked about what I wrote, in conjunction with his thinking, and like most good conversations, we kept building and building until we got to an even better set of notions.
The main conclusion we came to is that the success metrics for hiring are too short-sighted. I understand that. But what if we started tracking hiring statistics differently, focusing more on belonging and retention rather than headcounts and productivity? For the companies I want to be a part of, I feel like they are hiring humans rather than filling a role. And that’s a difference I think we should be talking about more often.
In my past, I’ve definitely been hired because I was the right shape for the hole a company was trying to fill. But when my shape changed, through additional knowledge or new aspirations, the company wasn’t elastic enough to accommodate my new shape. Other times, the shape of the hole I was filling for the company changed, because of a shift in focus or an adjustment in the market landscape, and I didn’t have the capacity to mold to the new structure quickly enough. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The companies I’ve been happiest working for did two important things for me and my coworkers:
1) Invested in us and our continuing education.
2) Created managers who were constantly checking in on our evolving career aspirations, and giving us the freedom to be curious and explore other areas within the company.
Before we get too much farther down this path, I need to do something which I should have also mentioned in my previous post about hiring, and that’s to recognize the immense amount of privilege required to try to do any of this. It’s a privilege to be picky about where you want to work. It’s a privilege to get even one offer. And a privilege to be able to say all of this so openly without worry about how it may change your prospects of even being considered for a role. Right now I have that privilege. And soon (hopefully), I’ll be in a position to start advocating for these changes so that we can get better at getting people into better positions. Now, back to the suggestions.
The other idea I want to see more prevalent in hiring conversations is goals. This can come in many forms, but I think both the employer and employee should have a better understanding of what success looks like after a person is hired. Where should you be in 90 days? What should you have accomplished after six months? Which preparatory training or services will you have access to in order to explore what’s next in your career? These kinds of questions can go a long way in finding out which companies care about you as a person, and which care more about you as a human resource.
And that brings me to my last point. In one way or another, companies will ship their org chart. It’s almost unavoidable, for both companies big and small. So we need to do a better job of designing our organizations. I may be biased, both because I’ve worked on design teams for so long and because my lunch partner today is a brilliant design ops person, but I truly believe that every company needs a designer to help build their organizational framework. If we break it down, it’s just a structure. We design buildings, why can’t we get better at designing teams? If I go on much further about this, though, I’ll quickly get out of my depth. But I know that the teams I have been most productive on, providing the best value to our customers and users, were the ones which had thoughtfully integrated my skills into the entirety of the organization. Doing this well is a smart investment, if only to cut down on the constant recruiting, hiring, and training costs which can arise from doing it poorly.
If we step back and think about this holistically, we need to create more opportunities to hire people, not positions. And account for the fact that people change. When we are flexible enough to account for both those facts, we create enough psychological safety for teams to really innovate and solve problems through their creativity. And isn’t that the whole point?
See you tomorrow?