What's the "AHA!" REPORT all about?

This series of newsletters contains AHA! information to help people and organizations hire the best employees, make the best promotion decisions, retain the most qualified people, maintain the widest applicant pool, follow best practices, and (if you are subject to US law) remain aware of EEOC hot-spots.

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Look, Up in the Sky! It's a Sequel!

What it is about superhero movies that makes them so perennially successful? It goes deeper than the familiar characters, snappy dialogue, and nonstop action. They give us a pure distillation of what Hollywood does best:
a no-worries vacation from our socially complex, morally conflicted world. For two hours we can revel in a simple, black-and-white storyline with just one good guy, one bad guy, and a lot of explosions.

The downside to the superhero universe is that if you aren't 12 years old, the various characters all tend to run together. That's probably why they identify themselves using bright colors and prominent logos, like fast-food restaurants. In the working world, however, it can be much more difficult to understand who the heroes are -- or more prosaically, to "evaluate quality of hire."

Saving the World One Applicant at a Time
Imagine, if you will, that the end of the world is imminent and you're advertising for superheroes to save the planet. There are a dozen steroid-pumped, ego-centric applicants sitting in your waiting room wearing masks, capes, and tights. Each hero claims to have saved the world at one time or another. You hire three of them.

Six months later, the world is still more or less intact. Success! But how do you measure your quality of hire?

Evaluating quality of hire requires looking at performance in a different way. It requires mentally separating the "how" from "what." The "what" merely represents the outcome: The world did not end. The "how" represents everything a superhero actually says or does to make that happen. Here is the hard part to accept: evaluating quality of hire depends almost entirely on evaluating "how" the hero performed the job, not the outcome. Regardless of opinions to the contrary, "how" is the only part of the job under the hero's control. It is the only thing separating one hero from another.

Space Cadets
Let's say that our superheroes' first day on the job featured asteroid showers that threatened Earth. When he was on duty, Time Twister reacted by turning back time to prevent disaster. On her shift, Wonder Woman pulled the asteroids into new orbits with her lasso. And when it was his turn, Superman flew faster than a speeding bullet, smashing them into smithereens. The "what" was essentially the same for all three. Reversing time, using lassos, and brute force were all examples of "how."

What about evaluating the quality of these hires? Let's look closer. Time Twister's action trapped the world in a time loop. The universe kept rewinding and playing back. The asteroids never hit, but the world also missed Thanksgiving and Christmas, causing turkey farmers all over the land to go bankrupt.

Wonder Woman had trouble finding her invisible airplane in the office parking lot. She got airborne in time to lasso the largest in the next wave of asteroids, but some small ones got through and vaporized the world's television broadcast satellites. And before Superman punched the clock, he decided to stop at Starbucks for a little pick-me-up. By the time he was fully caffeinated, the asteroids were too close to be completely destroyed and one piece broke off, annihilating New Jersey (starting a lively argument about whether the Garden State was a fair trade for a Venti Holiday Peppermint Mocha).

Now can you evaluate quality of hire?

Constructive Criticism
Assessing quality of hire should be based on the same elements as determining which applicant to hire in the first place. You have to decide beforehand "how" a job is to be done. Looking only at results can confuse performance because there are so many other things that can affect them. Superman might have been successful if he was more motivated. Time Twister should have thought through the long-term consequences of time-tinkering. Wonder Woman might have been more successful if she had recognized the problems associated with operating an invisible plane.

Human performance always has three components: 1) an antecedent or event; 2) the candidates' response or behavior; and, 3) the consequence or result. In my business folks call these the A-B-C of performance. The antecedent and consequence are the "what" (i.e., the results). The candidate's behavior is the "how" (i.e., what the employee said or did when confronted with the situation). "How" is what we use to define job requirements, select and promote employees, and evaluate quality of hire.

Thinking vs. Doing
You can think of every job as having standards for motivation, organization, analytical thought, learning, and behaving. For sales jobs these might include competitive drive, time and territory management, sales development strategies, learning new products, making presentations, and so forth. Management jobs might include the motivation to direct and develop subordinates (instead of doing it yourself), achieving objectives, solving problems, managing the marketplace, and coaching skills. Jobs always have both cognitive components and behavioral components.

The key to understanding "how" is knowing which behaviors vary with the job holder, which are necessary for successful job performance, and which are associated with failure.

Why don't we more often use "how" to evaluate employee and applicant quality? Part of the problem is that "hows" can occur hours, days, or even months before we see results. These actions are often subtle, and we either forget or overlook them. Results, on the other hand, are usually singular in-your-face events that command attention. So we look at results and jump to conclusions about "hows", often taking them for granted.

Think Fast!
People seem to have an intuitive understanding that "hows" are important. Unfortunately we are wired internally to make fast decisions based on little data. While this might have been a good survival strategy back in the Paleolithic, nowadays it leads recruiters and hiring managers to make huge assumptions about candidate skills.

Negative information (for example, a typo in a resume, or massive destruction by asteroids) leads us to assume the candidate is sloppy and inept. Positive information (high sales dollars, or saving the world) leads us to assume the candidate is highly skilled. A successful recruiter who knows how to identify and evaluate candidate "hows" will both recruit better candidates and be able to better evaluate quality of hire.