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Author
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Topic: Do you play well with others? You're hired!
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Paper Trail
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Member # 3269
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posted November 06, 2007 10:48 AM
You may have the right credentials for the job, but the wrong personality
NEW YORK - A resume and a brief job interview can’t answer the question that matters most to a new hire’s co-workers: Is this person an absolute pain?
Despite a labor shortage in many sectors, some employers are pickier than ever about whom they hire. Businesses in fields where jobs are highly coveted — or just sound like fun — are stepping up efforts to weed out people who might have the right credentials but the wrong personality.
Call it the “plays well with others” factor.
Job candidates at investment banks have long endured dozens of interviews designed, in part, to see if new hires will get along with everyone they’ll work with. Whole Foods Market Inc. holds group interviews, in which people who will work under a manager are part of the team that grills candidates and collectively picks hires.
Now other companies are setting up higher hurdles.
“In this bloggable, cell phone camera world, your brand on the inside is going to be your brand on the outside. If you have a bunch of jerks, your brand is going to be a jerk,” said Tim Sanders, former leadership coach at Yahoo Inc. and author of “The Likeability Factor.”
With the national unemployment rate low, at 4.7 percent, and the Baby Boom generation heading into retirement, employers from Microsoft Corp. to rural hospitals are worrying about finding enough workers. But companies like Rackspace Managed Hosting are bucking that trend, working hard to find reasons to turn people away.
Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier said, “We’d rather miss a good one than hire a bad one.”
The 1,900-person computer server hosting company is divided into 18- to 20-person teams. One team is so close, the whole group shows up to help when one member moves into a new home, Napier said. Job interviews at the San Antonio-based company last all day, as interviewers try to rub away fake pleasantness.
“They’re here for nine or 10 hours,” Napier said. “We’re very cordial about it. We’re not aggressive, but we haven’t met a human being yet who has the stamina to BS us all day.”
There’s a possible downside, however. In a Harvard Business Review article titled “Fool vs. Jerk: Whom Would You Hire?” Tiziana Casciaro of Harvard and Miguel Sousa Lobo of Duke University point out that people generally like people who are similar to them, so hiring for congeniality can limit diversity of opinions. One venture capitalist told the authors that a capable manager he worked with built a team that “had a great time going out for a beer, but the quality of their work was seriously compromised.”
That’s not the worry at Lindblad Expeditions, a 500-employee adventure cruise company.
Kris Thompson, vice president of human resources at Lindblad, said, “You can teach people any technical skill, but you can’t teach them how to be a kindhearted, generous-minded person with an open spirit.”
In the mating dance of job interviews, employers traditionally put their best feet forward, too, trumpeting their wonderful benefits packages while leaving out the bit about working late, eating cold pizza.
Not Lindblad. It sends job applicants a DVD showing not one, but two shots of a crew member cleaning toilets. A dishwasher talks about washing 5,000 dishes in one day. “Be prepared to work your butt off,” another says.
“It’s meant to scare you off,” company founder Sven Lindblad said.
It does. After watching the DVD and hearing an unvarnished description of life onboard a Lindblad ship, the majority of applicants drop out, Thompson said.
New hires “undergo a drug test, a physical exam, they have to pack up their life, we buy them a plane ticket and outfit them with hundreds of dollars in uniforms,” Thompson said. “If they get on board and say, ’This is not what I expected,’ then shame on us.”
She asks applicants to tell her about a job that wasn’t what they expected and how they dealt with it. One of the best answers came from Kendra Nelsen, who said that while she was working construction, her male co-workers would help themselves to her tools. Her solution: She painted all her tools hot pink. Nelsen, who started as a deck hand, went on to earn a U.S. Coast Guard license and was just named assistant expedition leader in Antarctica.
At KaBoom, a nonprofit that builds playgrounds, the board was hammering co-founder and CEO Darell Hammond four years ago over the organization’s high employee turnover.
“I rationalized that they were on the road too much, when in reality, it was the wrong fit in the wrong role,” he said.
He started thinking about who left and why, then focused on the characteristics of workers who stayed. The list of traits: Can do, will do, team fit, damn quick and damn smart.
His team kept a closer eye on job applicants in the reception area, which is set up as a playground, to see how they acted around playground equipment.
“If you’re early, you may have to sit on a swing or the bottom of a slide,” Hammond said. People who stand with a tight grip on their briefcases instead of sitting on the playground equipment aren’t asked back.
KaBoom sends prospective project managers to one of its four-day playground building trips, with the actual build on the last day involving 200 to 300 volunteers, many of whom have questions for KaBoom staff.
“If they’re not easily approached, or they’re easily stressed — this is the way we find out and they find out if it’s not going to work,” he said.
Hammond wouldn’t say what percentage of applicants drop out, but he did say project managers’ tenure has increased since they started sending them on the trips four years ago, from one year’s tenure to between two-and-a-half and three years.
“We got more passionate people who stayed longer,” Hammond said. “What was going to be expected of them when they came on board wasn’t a stab in the dark.”
Hammond said he isn’t afraid of scaring people off, since the best candidates “are constantly looking at themselves to excel, not just cross the finish line, but blow through the finish line.”
When all 90 of the people on his staff meet that criteria, he said, “It’s incredible. If you have 89 who do and one who doesn’t — it’s painful.”
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Posts: 2153 | From: here | Registered: May 2003
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TVMattNYC
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Member # 4950
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posted November 06, 2007 10:59 AM
I don't see this applying in network news, at least at my network.
90% of the TOP jobs are held by absolute a$$holes.
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Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
Posts: 3839 | From: New York City | Registered: Dec 2003
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jrat33
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Member # 1745
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posted November 06, 2007 12:14 PM
quote:
Originally posted by TVMattNYC:
I don't see this applying in network news, at least at my network.
90% of the TOP jobs are held by absolute a$$holes.
Oh I think that number is WAAAAAY low.
Posts: 2148 | From: Red Sox Nation!!! | Registered: Jul 2002
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Pro
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Member # 5396
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posted November 06, 2007 02:00 PM
I went on a ND interview many years ago and as part of the process, I was "grilled" by the producers,anchors and reporters. Everyone had their own agendas. I was as pleasant as possible, but felt offended.
I later told the GM that it appeared to me that he saw the position as only a "babysitter" rather than the leader. That I only wanted to work in a place that put their trust in ME, more than they did the staff. In short, it seemed like the GM was letting the "inmates run the asylum".
I never heard back from that place. Which was fine by me.
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casterdamus
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Member # 2207
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posted November 06, 2007 03:13 PM
This industry doesn't even invest the time and effort into figuring out what is currently wrong or know what will be good or bad for it, tomorrow. While others are taking the 'do you play well with others' approach, television will continue to follow its small market 'I need a warm body'/large market 'give be a pretty face' templates. Television news has been dying an excrutiatingly slow death and many of those in it, especially management, are little more than fumbling, bumbling caregivers.
Posts: 248 | From: central plains | Registered: Oct 2002
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Bureau Chief
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Member # 9339
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posted November 07, 2007 08:47 AM
PRO, isnt it true in most newsrooms, at least in the smaller markets, that the producers, assignment desk and anchors really do run the day to day operations? If you cant trust your staff to run their shows, then you have a problem and micro-managing probably wont fix it. You cant be there 24 hours a day to over-see them. If you have a good team under you, then point the way and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and let them show you what they can do, if the consistantly fail, then its time to step in with a heavier hand. IMO
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"With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, "Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"
Posts: 1754 | From: BFE | Registered: Nov 2005
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Pro
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Member # 5396
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posted November 07, 2007 03:07 PM
quote:
Originally posted by Bureau Chief:
PRO, isnt it true in most newsrooms, at least in the smaller markets, that the producers, assignment desk and anchors really do run the day to day operations? If you cant trust your staff to run their shows, then you have a problem and micro-managing probably wont fix it. You cant be there 24 hours a day to over-see them. If you have a good team under you, then point the way and then GET OUT OF THE WAY and let them show you what they can do, if the consistantly fail, then its time to step in with a heavier hand. IMO
All of that is true.
But the point is who does management trust to make the decisions of their news department? The ND or the staff?
Maybe I'm being naieve but I believe a GM should hire a ND he/she trusts,and let him/her take it from there. It's the staff's job to get along with the ND, not the other way around.
But I know a lot of GM's think THEY should make the major news department decisions, and the ND is just the "caretaker".
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Bureau Chief
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Member # 9339
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posted November 07, 2007 05:29 PM
Ya I agree. Cant give them college kids to much power, they will have us all watching you tube. The process of having them interview you sounds weird for sure.
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"With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, "Are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"
Posts: 1754 | From: BFE | Registered: Nov 2005
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