RECRUITING AND HIRING

A company is a living, breathing entity. It is either evolving or dying.

—Angela Blanchard

Butte, Montana, began to attract miners during the mid- nineteenth century, primarily to pan and dig for gold and silver. There were some successes, but Butte didn’t live up to the expectations elevated by its early gold rush. Despite this, it is still referred to as “the richest hill on earth.” Why?

Within a few decades of the initial rush, disappointed speculators were selling their mining claims in Butte for dirt cheap. A handful of people began to buy up and consolidate claims and mining operations, content to extract wealth at a more leisurely pace than the earliest settlers had hoped for. Importantly, they began to discover and exploit copper—a low-end resource at the time. The development of several technologies, principally electrical wiring, made copper valuable—extremely valuable. The few who by then held most of the property and mineral rights became some of the wealthiest people in the world as they reaped the windfall of discovery-driven resource exploration and development. They are collectively referred to as the Copper Kings. Butte presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, but that potential wasn’t recognized by the gold seekers with their dreams of instant gratification.

I often think of the story of Butte when managers tell me they can’t find qualified candidates, complain that schools don’t turn out graduates with the right skills, or that they have an opening that’s just impossible to fill. Really?

Think of a role that is currently open in your company or on your team. What are the requisite capabilities? Are these the minimum competencies required, or are you stuck in the rut of expecting top-of-the-curve expertise? Are you seeking the gold standard? Or will silver do? How about copper? There are compelling reasons to go for copper.

Humans as Resources

Here’s what usually sets the stage for a new hire: we’re shorthanded and overwhelmed. A key employee has moved within the company, opted for a fresh start elsewhere, or taken a leave of absence. Maybe business has suddenly ramped up with the signing of a new client or the winning of a large contract. We need help in the form of a body who can step into the role today and do the job now. Someone to salve our pain.

Desperate, we hire the person who we perceive to be the most qualified to fill the void, and for a time, they do. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure,” goes the adage. Because we hired someone at the top of the curve, within months they are bored and looking around for a new suitor. Soon we’ll be back at square one: overwhelmed, on the rebound, and poised to hire in haste again.

That’s not a great use of resources. Utilizing resources profitably begins with recognizing potential, followed by a period of exploration, discovery, and development. This is how we learn what works and what does not; this is how we uncover what is possible. When we think of people, truly, as human resources, rather than expecting them to be ready-made products, we follow a similar approach. Hiring for potential rather than proficiency is the foundation for building an A-team.

I recognize that this approach is antithetical to some HR practices. Think about the last job requisition you posted. You probably tried to hire someone at the top of the learning curve who already knew how to do everything the job required—plus the kitchen sink. It’s natural for busy managers to think to themselves, “I don’t have time to train someone; we need someone who can do the job on day one.” Moreover, managers often have an incentive to write inflated job descriptions, because in many organizations doing so makes it more likely that their request for a new hire will be approved (“Look how much this new hire will do!”), and when it is approved, it gives them more of a salary budget to play with.

There are downsides to hiring this way. One is that the “wish list” approach to job qualifications turns off many employees who don’t fit the bill. Some studies suggest that women especially are less likely to apply for jobs they’re not 100 percent qualified for, under the mistaken impression that job requirements are actually, well, “requirements.”¹

Another downside is that when we recruit by advertising for maximum rather than minimum qualifications and hire the most qualified candidate in the applicant pool, we have already shortened their shelf life. With little room to rise, the new hire will be feeling stale in no time. While they acclimate to a new culture, their lack of challenge likely won’t immediately be obvious, but after a few months they will be predictably bored.

We will then either find a new role for them to fill, or they will leave (more than 40 percent of employees who voluntarily leave their jobs do so within six months of their start date, and half have moved on in less than a year).² Considering the cost of recruitment and hiring and the investment required in initial training, this is a mind-boggling waste of resources.

In 2005, Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and her colleague Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology at CUNY (City University of New York), conducted case studies on thirteen employers in New Jersey in which they broke down turnover costs for both hourly employees and salaried managerial and professional employees.³ They examined often-overlooked costs such as the salary of recruiters, the cost per hour to conduct interviews with two or three salaried managers, the cost of the employee’s time who is training a new hire, advertising fees, travel related to recruitment and interviewing, time spent on screening and background checks, and many other costs of turnover.

Their research led to the creation of an interactive employee turnover calculator to help businesses break down the cost of hiring a new employee. What they found is eye-opening.⁴ The cost to replace an employee in the United States earning $75,000 or less (which accounts for a high percentage of total employees) is about 20 percent of the employee’s annual salary. Those costs increase dramatically for highly compensated senior executives and employees with highly specialized skills, topping 200 percent of their annual salary.⁵ Losing employees costs businesses thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. Get recruiting and hiring right, and you impact the bottom line.

Meredith Kopit Levien, executive VP and COO of the New York Times, names Forbes CEO Mike Perlis as her most influential boss. Why? Because when he promoted her to chief revenue officer at Forbes, she was not an expert in digital media—she was at the low end of this curve. There were many naysayers who wondered, “How the hell is she going to do this job? She’s a magazine publisher.” But she describes Perlis as having “unbelievable patience” and a belief in her, which gave her confidence. “He gave me the space to … figure it out,” she says. Meredith was in this role for five years before she was hired away by the New York Times. That’s retention.

Patrick Pichette, former CFO of Google, was at the top of his curve when he was recruited into Google—but his boss understood that even C-level employees need the thrill of learning. “The job was not what I wanted at all,” he said. He had already been a CFO at two previous firms. However, in his meeting with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Pichette reports that Schmidt was very savvy. He remembers Schmidt saying, “Well, we have a real problem, Patrick. After eighteen months, you’ll be totally bored and you’re going to go and do something else. I’ll tell you what: I’ll hire you as CFO, and we’ll give you this and that and the other to start with, and every time it looks like you are about to lose interest, I’m going to add stuff onto your plate.”⁶ Schmidt made good on his offer. “That’s how I ended up over time with finance, organization, the people operations, the real estate, all the employee services, Google Fiber, Google.org,” Pichette relates. He spent seven years with Google before taking a sabbatical to travel and engage in environmental and other philanthropic causes.

The motivation for adopting an S curve management strategy is recognition that time plus competence equals boredom. Unless new variables are added to the equation, boredom quickly becomes synonymous with low engagement and declining productivity. The key to building a high-functioning team begins with a deliberate recruitment process: hire at the low end of the S curve.

Hire People Who Can Grow on the Job

Begin by reminding yourself that the goal is to approach human resources as raw materials rather than as finished products, the same way you would handle other resources. The following list constitutes the phase of exploration:

1.Identify the tasks you want a new hire to perform.

2.Do a team check: consider how the new role will affect the team.

3.Do a sanity check: identify your motivation for the new hire.

4.Write a job post to attract the ideal person.

Identify the Tasks You Want a New Hire to Perform

First, identify what you need done.

An empty space on the roster can put extreme pressure on your team, and their pain quickly becomes yours. Hiring someone just to make the pain go away is a powerful urge but a poor idea. Optimal hiring requires time and thought both to map and execute.

Start with the question: What is my need? The obvious response is, “I need a (fill-in-the-blank [systems, payroll, marketing, finance]) person.” This is a simple variable in the hiring equation, but we don’t always do a good job of solving for it. Rather than really thinking about what we want done, we usually assume we need someone to do what the previous employee in the role did, particularly if that person performed their part well. If we’re lucky, a great candidate will come along and tell us what we really need.

Five years ago, Michelle McKenna-Doyle (who you met in chapter 2) was at a crossroads in her career. The company she worked for was going through a merger, and to retain her position as CIO, she would have to relocate, which she didn’t want to do. A devoted sports fan, McKenna-Doyle happened to be on the NFL website picking her fantasy football team when she noticed a link for jobs, which led her to a job opening for a VP of IT (information technology). Not knowing anyone at the NFL, McKenna-Doyle started combing her network to come up with someone who could make a warm introduction. It turned out that was the easy part. When I spoke with her she said, “When I read the description, I thought, ‘They need a CIO, not a VP of IT.’ They need to upgrade the position—make it a CIO, make it a senior vice president, give this role a seat at the table.”

Roger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, got McKenna- Doyle’s vision: how she would connect the dots among the NFL’s divisions from a technology and information perspective. She recalls Goodell telling her, “You’ve sold me. I’ve sold our CFO and HR. Now, you’ve got to sell it to everybody else. No one here is going to know what a CIO is; we’ve never had one of you before.” It took some time to convince the NFL to expand her role beyond managing the data center and keeping the phones up and running. But by the time she finished her first year there, McKenna-Doyle had implemented so many valuable initiatives that there was no question the CIO role was and is vital to the future of her organization.

Hers is a great dream-job-come-true story. It also illustrates a common hiring mistake: the NFL advertised a job opening for a VP of IT because that was the job title of the person who had left.

When you have a job opening on your team, instead of habitually posting openings using recycled job descriptions from previous hiring cycles, evaluate what you need now. Don’t accept that it has to stay as it currently is. Genuinely understand what you are looking for, then make the effort to find it. Rather than requiring the ideal candidate to possess mastery of the entire skill set for the job, hire people for their low-end-of-the-curve capacity to fill many roles, not just the top-shelf, high-end-of-the-curve qualifications for one role. What are the minimum, rather than the maximum, competencies required to be successful? Think copper, not gold.

Remember to include soft skills. What are some of the less-tangible qualities that would benefit the team? Which ones make an individual a good fit with your company culture? Are some of these less-tangible abilities noticeably missing in the current composition of the team? Are you in need of a good organizer? Someone who writes well or is adept with the public? A peacemaker, challenger, or facilitator? Someone creative with a lot of technical expertise who is also comfortable with people?

Most candidates for a job come with a body of acquired knowledge and skills. These things will be listed on their résumé and emphasized in the cover letter. These individuals also have strengths, or “superpowers”: things they do instinctively that may not be clearly articulated in their job application. By identifying some of the human qualities that we value in a hire, we make it easier to read between the lines to discern them; we can prepare to probe for them during the interview process. This is where references can be helpful. Let’s always be open to superpowers, even if we haven’t identified a pressing need for them. Superpowers are where an individual’s greatest potential lies.

There’s a lot of literature on CEO succession and the cross-disciplinary experience deemed necessary.⁷ The fact is, every hire is important. You are trying to fill both an individual contributor pipeline and a leadership one with promising talent. Investment in ahead-of-the-curve exploration will be repaid with the discovery of better raw material. Be strategic with your hires—every one of them.

Consider How a New Role Will Affect the Team

What percentage of team members are currently at the low end of their S curves? Do you have 15 percent at the low end, 70 percent in the middle, and 15 percent at the high end? While I generally argue for hiring people at the low end of the learning curve so they have runway, if you’re managing a team of novices it might make sense to hire (or rent) someone more seasoned.

Now look back at the list of skills and qualifications you’ve listed for this new role. Are there tasks other members of your team could take on as development opportunities? When we see the same people at work every day they can become like wallpaper: we no longer focus on their specific work as well as we ought to. With a little effort, we may discover that we have an employee near or at the top of their current learning curve who is perfectly poised to jump to the low end of the S curve we were thinking of hiring for. Making an internal hire often means we’ve created the potential for at least two employees to grow: the one we’ve promoted and the one we’re hiring.

Also, understand how your people work together. How might a new hire enhance the capacities your team already has? Are you short a soprano or a tenor? Missing an accompanist? Is there a soloist in the choir, and is their contribution harmonious or does it grate on the ear despite the quality of their voice? Where are the gaps in good team coordination and compatibility?

When Dave Winsborough, VP of innovation at Hogan Assessments, was only twelve, a couple of classmates beat him up for always knowing the answers and outperforming his scholastic peers.⁸ He credits this experience with kindling a lifelong fascination with group dynamics. Winsborough has collaborated with Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Hogan Assessment’s CEO, to synthesize the results of varied research around teaming. They state:

A useful way to think about teams … is to consider the two roles every person plays in a working group: a functional role, based on their formal position and technical skill, and a psychological role, based on the kind of person they are. Some employees feel an almost zealous sense of mission about their work; others embrace it as valuable to varying degrees but without a sense of personal calling. These differences in sentiment can be points of contention. Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows.⁹

To further plumb the psychological aspect, you may want to administer the Disruptive Strengths Indicator (DSI). This tool (available at whitneyjohnson.com/diagnostic) examines which of the seven accelerants of learning and growth (outlined in chapter 2) people rely on to manage through change. Are they especially good at playing to their strengths, embracing constraints, or rebounding from failure? You can work through this assessment for the individual and then perform the same evaluation on the team.

Team dysfunction is like family dysfunction: it undermines individual development and is counterproductive to the purposes of the whole. Envision employee roles as sinuous S curves weaving together to form a whole cloth of great strength. Excessive friction is a barrier to progress that can hold or even push people down the curve. If you view your employees as discrete threads with little synergistic interaction, your team will fray instead of becoming a fine piece of fabric. Get the relationships right and the sum of your team will be greater than its parts.

Identify Your Motivation for the Hire

Research on consumer behavior demonstrates that we tend to buy the same things time and again, virtually without thought. A.G. Lafley, two-time CEO at Procter & Gamble, and Roger L. Martin examined these results while investigating why frequent rebranding—going for a “new look”—doesn’t necessarily translate into a competitive advantage. They found that in fact customers have a reflexive preference for the tried-and-true, thus leading familiar brands to a compounding competitive advantage over time. They conclude: “Research into the workings of the human brain suggests that the mind loves automaticity more than just about anything else—certainly more than engaging in conscious consideration. Given a choice, it would like to do the same things over and over.”¹⁰

As a manager performing a hiring function, you are a consumer of talent, susceptible to the tendency to constantly and thoughtlessly repeat your consumption habits. While this may not matter much when choosing laundry detergent, it can have dire consequences when hiring. Circumstances change, needs may evolve over time, or earlier iterations of the job description may have been poorly thought out. The prior team member may have been competent but didn’t always bring what we ideally wanted to the table, or maybe they didn’t play with the team as cooperatively as we would have liked, and so on. Hiring is the optimal time to address these issues.

Underlying our conscious exploration and evaluation, each of us also has a subconscious mind at work, potentially influencing our decision making—and not always for the better. Before making your final choices about whether and how to hire, do a “sanity check” to bring your subconscious and emotional motivations to the surface for examination as well. Essentially, we want to identify how we are hoping to “feel better” because of a new hire. What pain points do we hope to eliminate? Having identified these, we may require an adjustment to our expectations. If we onboard someone who can do the functional job but can’t do the emotional job, we won’t be satisfied no matter what they do.¹¹ Precipitous hiring may leave us with unmet functional needs as well.

Here are some of the subconscious emotional motivations that we rarely address head on but that we would do well to consider:

1. If only I could clone myself. According to Lauren Rivera, associate professor of management and organizations and sociology at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, “What most people are looking for is ‘me.’” Her studies suggest that “interviewers who lacked systematic measures of what their company was looking for tended to fall back on themselves and defined merit in ‘their own image,’ meaning that the most-qualified interviewees were those who best resembled their interviewers.”¹² Rivera became interested in examining hiring practices after observing the recruiting efforts of elite professional service firms, first as an undergraduate at Yale being recruited and later working for a recruiting firm. “I’ve always been fascinated by social status and how people judge merit,” she says. “Hiring is one of the most consequential status sorts that people experience, and I wanted to know more about how employers evaluate and select new hires. Hiring in these [professional service] firms matters not just for individuals’ own salaries or careers, but also for the composition of the American economic elite more broadly.”¹³

It’s easy to want to make this kind of hire: a carbon copy of yourself. Someone who thinks like you do and is readily agreeable to your approach. But they will be bored and frustrated quickly because there’s no headroom. You already have you. It’s also possible that you will feel threatened by this shinier version of you. It’s uncomfortable to have someone crowding you out on your S curve.

If you’re thinking about hiring a clone of yourself, you’re not thinking about S curves. Nor have you identified a discrete role for this new hire. Instead, view the pressure you’re feeling to hire as an opportunity to do something differently than before, to innovate. Maybe you delegate more, offering team members new mountains to climb. Perhaps you make better use of technology. Once you start considering options, you’ll realize how many good ones there are.

2. If only I could find someone to do all the annoying stuff I don’t want to do. This mentality comes from a desire to avoid all the disagreeable parts of your job or to find a scapegoat for everyone to hate so that you can be loved. A few years ago, I was invited to interview for the position of CFO at a fast-growing tech company. There are a lot of roles a CFO can play, but when the COO said to me, “I’m looking for someone to tell everyone how much they can’t spend,” my sense was he was hoping to outsource the job of financial henchman. If you want to offload everything that you detest doing to a new hire, it’s likely they’ll also become your emotional dumping ground and you won’t like them (a sentiment they will be inclined to return). Nor will you be motivated to invest in them. When this person reaches the top of their S curve—if they stay that long—you won’t care enough to help them jump to a new one.

If you think this way when hiring, you will have retention problems. Just as looking for a clone may mean you need to delegate more, wanting a “bad cop” may mean it’s time to take on more of the grunt work yourself. At the very least, learn to discern between delegating tasks that will optimize your team’s performance and a penchant for off-loading tasks that are your responsibility.

3. If only I knew how to do that. There may be tasks that demand attention that you don’t personally have the expertise to complete. It’s why you are hiring someone. But sometimes there is an undercurrent of envy, a secret longing. If I knew how to do what they know how to do, I’d be more successful. You may hope to live vicariously through a capable person, possibly enjoy advancement on the strength of their abilities. Or you may feel threatened because they have talents you lack. Either way, you risk overpaying financially—and emotionally.

Instead of taking this approach, couch the emotion this way: If only I knew what I don’t know. Don’t just say it, learn to really mean it. Simple reason requires that we accept that we have limitations and acknowledge what they are—even that we search them out, if we’ve been avoiding the fact of their existence. If you really want to move your organization forward, hire people with varied skill sets and who are seeking different S curves. Find people who disagree with you. Open your team to those who aren’t like you, who challenge your thinking, and who will point out what you don’t know.

To the extent you lack mastery over areas of the domain you manage, part of your S curve is to learn. Amanda Goodall, senior lecturer at Cass Business School in London, has spent her career exploring the relationship between leadership domain expertise and employee engagement and longevity. She asserts that “the benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction … Among American workers, having a technically competent boss is considerably more important for employee job satisfaction than their salary (even when pay is really high).”¹⁴ Significantly, Goodall has replicated her research multiple times across various sectors with the same results: doctors are happier when hospital administrators are also doctors, professional athletes are more satisfied when coaches and managers are former players, academics prefer other academics as university administrators, and so on. If this is you, remember that your employees don’t want you to do their job for them, even though you could. But they do work better knowing that you understand what they do.

Let go of expertise envy. Hire people who know what you don’t. But know enough that you comprehend the challenges you ask them to tackle, can value their good work, and help them onto curves that will maximize their talent.

Write a Job Post to Attract the Ideal Person

Writing job postings is more of an art form than most of us realize. A friend of mine was feeling a bit stagnant in her role: she’d been with the same company for ten years and in the same job for the past three. While she loved her company, she was ready for a new learning curve. So she was browsing the job postings in her industry just to see what other options might be out there. She was becoming quite discouraged, reading description after description that sounded tedious and uncreative, when she suddenly happened upon a job opening in her own company. She’d known the woman who’d worked in that role—it was a fabulous job. But the description was just as bad as all the others. Suddenly and counterintuitively, she was full of hope. If her own company, where she’d loved working for the past decade, could post such a repellent job description for such a fantastic role, then maybe those other jobs being advertised weren’t so bad either. Just think how powerfully a great job listing would stand out in such a landscape.

The goal of a job posting should be to attract talented people who are qualified to onboard at the low end of the job’s learning curve. They won’t be experts, but they will have what it takes to learn and magnify their current position and other roles beyond it. Catching the eye of these candidates requires a change in how job requirements are typically articulated. Dorothy Dalton, an international talent management strategist, concurs:

For the hiring manager, the seniority and level of a team can be an in-house status symbol. On some occasions the academic requirements demanded for some positions would ordinarily be sufficient to split the atom or find a cure for cancer. MBAs are not essential for all openings. If we are honest, many jobs don’t even require a degree, let alone any post-grad qualifications. Provided literacy, numeracy, and social skills are in place as well as any relevant professional experience, the university of life would be just fine … The same can be said for years and type of experience required.¹⁵

If we inflate the necessary qualifications, focus on high-end-of-the-curve capacity, and then hire the applicant who comes closest to meeting these criteria, we set the stage for a poor employment fit. Instead, we need to temper our overblown ambitions and look for a quality, high-potential candidate who won’t become disinterested within the first few months of employment. Write the job posting to encourage, rather than deter, such applicants.

There is a considerable body of literature available to assist in striking the right tone in our job postings. Gender neutrality in language, for instance, is critical.¹⁶ In most cases this is necessary to encourage women to apply, but not always. In many medical professions traditionally occupied by women, for example, studies show that men are discouraged from applying because the language of job advertisements is perceived as too feminine.¹⁷ Encouraging diversity in the applicant pool is a necessary step to fostering diversity in the workplace. Pamela Rice, head of technology strategy at Capital One, has a strong track record for hiring diverse candidates. “There is a knock-on effect that occurs when organizations invest in diversity,” she explains. “They automatically see more diverse candidates being referred, and diverse candidates flock to companies where their impact is recognized and appreciated. It’s also no surprise that the innovation and products coming out of these diverse teams are more compelling to users who happen to be diverse as well.”

Make it clear in the job posting why this role really matters. A nationwide survey by Net Impact and Rutgers University, for example, reveals that “employees who say they can make an impact while on the job report greater satisfaction than those who can’t by a 2:1 ratio. This data is backed up by the two-thirds of graduating university students who tell us that making a difference through their next job is a priority and 45 percent of students say they would even take a pay cut to do so.”¹⁸ In fact, 58 percent of the surveyed workers of all ages claimed they would accept a 15 percent loss in basic compensation to work for a company with values aligned to their own. While there are gender differences reported, with values-oriented work being somewhat more important to women than men, and slight differences across generations, the data points overwhelmingly to a workforce that is hungry to perform tasks that matter.

We want to contribute and feel energized, even passionate about what we do. We want to be inspired by ideas that can solve problems. For most, the meaning of the work doesn’t have to matter in the broadest sense. We don’t insist on changing the world or addressing cosmically important issues. But we do yearn to believe that we are making our corner of the world happier in some small but significant way. Make the case that the S curve you are hiring for matters; convey this sense of consequence through the job description.

Hire Where Others Aren’t

When hiring managers say they can’t find anyone for a role, I always wonder if they’ve looked at internal candidates, caregivers returning to the workforce, or military veterans. There’s really no one out there for your open job?

This goes back to the concept of market risk and competitive risk described in chapter 2. Sure, there’s some risk in hiring a nontraditional candidate—but it’s market risk, because you’re playing in a green field with few competitors. Hiring an Ivy League–educated MBA who has done the exact job you need doing for the past three years might feel safe, but it’s actually a form of competitive risk. You’ll be competing with a dozen other rival firms for that candidate.

Hiring where others aren’t begins with internal hiring: promoting or moving people who want to try something new. They are frequently at the top of one S curve. What they propose to do next may be considered a step back in terms of title and even compensation. Ultimately, titles and compensation are subjective designations. They can be adapted to reflect opportunity and contribution rather than being tied solely to outmoded hierarchical models. Proven employees who jump at something different, despite the disadvantages, are a hugely overlooked resource.

Also consider unconventional hiring arrangements. While data varies greatly from survey to survey, there are reports that in 2016, 30 percent or more of workers performed some contract or freelance work.¹⁹ Some of these workers want to be permanent participants in the gig economy, but not all. Firms sometimes hire on a contract or freelance basis to see if there is a fit. Many of these firms have a pathway for interns, freelancers, and contract workers to become full-time employees.

Once such a pathway is in place it can also be applied to the hiring of nontraditional employees: “on-rampers (those who have taken a break from the full-time career highway but are now ready to return), nondegreed workers, returning military personnel, and retirees,” says iRelaunch cofounder Carol Fishman Cohen. An advocate for the value of the unconventional labor pool, she provides guidelines for how employers can implement mid-career internship programs and access the return-to-work pool. She also has compelling data to share: for example, MetLife hired eleven out of twelve (92 percent) of its mid-career interns after about three months.²⁰

One group of nontraditional employees to pay particular attention to is on-rampers. Many of these are women who’ve been caring for children. The Center for Work-Life Policy found that 69 percent of highly qualified women—those with an advanced university degree or very prestigious undergraduate degree at a minimum—report that they would have stayed in the workforce all along if their employer could have arranged a more flexible situation for them, while 89 percent of these women would like to return to work, usually within just a few years.²¹

It isn’t only women. Men also choose to take career breaks for a variety of reasons: child care, elder care, a period of ill health, additional education, and more. After a decade at home as lead parent, my husband was ready to go back to work.²² He’s a cancer researcher with a doctorate degree from Columbia University who was formerly an assistant professor at UMass Medical School. When he launched his effort to on-ramp, no one was interested, in spite of his credentials. Eventually an associate vouched for him with Southern Virginia University, a small liberal arts college in central Virginia. He’s now back on the tenure track, something that rarely happens when a person takes a break from academia. He’s entirely focused on teaching and has an entrepreneurial streak that fits well with the goals of this ambitious and expanding school. It’s a win-win. The position is a new curve for him and the university gets a highly engaged employee—all because they were willing to hire him when others were not.

On-rampers are especially attractive because they often possess the skills that the workplace needs. Think of the competencies required to care for family, either parents or children. These skills are often in high demand and short supply. Michelle R. Weise, senior VP of workforce strategies and chief innovation officer at Strada Education Network, summarizes research by Burning Glass Technologies that identifies the qualifications almost universally desired by employers, regardless of sector or specialty: presentation and persuasion; customer service; attention to detail and time management; positive disposition; project management, research, and strategy; and supervisory skills. These are all abilities honed by effective parents and providers of elder care.²³

David Blake, founder of learning platform Degreed, puts it more succinctly: “Degrees suck!” His company promotes the idea that degrees signify only a small percentage of a person’s actual education. So Blake is innovating ways for individuals to map—and for potential employers to verify—the full landscape of education and skills, however they are acquired.²⁴

At IBM’s Rocket Center in West Virginia, where the focus is on cloud computing, cybersecurity, application development, and help desks, nearly a third of new hires in the past two years have not had four-year college degrees. Sean Bridges is one of these unconventional hires. He came to IBM with no work history, but he had certain demonstrable skills. He had studied information technology at a community college, and he had built and sold some stripped-down personal computers. Bridges is now a computer security analyst for IBM. He represents a new category in the labor market: “new collar” or middle-skill jobs, where skills (such as coding) are more important than pedigree (college degrees and job history).²⁵ In the United States, where two-thirds of adults do not have a four-year college degree, finding candidates to fill roles may require taking a chance on unconventional hires.²⁶ Potential is manifest not only—and perhaps not best—in conventional credentials.

Then there’s the boomerang employee: someone who has worked at the organization in the past. Once it was common to have a policy against rehiring former employees, but fortunately more companies are doing away with such rules. Skills acquired in a different venue can make a former employee even more valuable. Lee Caraher, author of The Boomerang Principle: Inspire Lifetime Loyalty from Your Employees, says, “Stop thinking about job hoppers as lost employees. Treat people well and help them realize their goals, wherever this may take them, and the person you felt left too soon might hop right back to you and be even more valuable the second time.”

Caraher’s company, Double Forte, practices what she preaches. The PR, content marketing, and social media firm has had over a dozen employees boomerang, some of them twice. Jenna Galloway Faller had been at Double Forte for two years as a senior account executive when she left for a dream position with a VC-backed fast-casual food startup. Faller left with Double Forte’s assurance that the door was open if she wanted to return. A year later, she did, with enhanced skills in PR management, a greater empathy for Double Forte’s traditional customers and, as she says, “a new appreciation for this industry and our company’s culture, making me a very enthusiastic employee and manager.”

We may be inclined to pass over nontraditional candidates because we think they are defective in some way. We may be fearful of making a mistake and allow risk aversion to triumph in our decision making. But market risk is where the big opportunity awaits. Coss Marte is a former drug dealer who ran a very lucrative business until he went to prison. Now he is a legitimate CEO operating a Manhattan-based health club, ConBody, that employs the formerly incarcerated as fitness instructors and personal trainers. This is an extreme example of hiring where others won’t—and it is proving to be a great success.

Nontraditional employees can be storehouses of education, skill, and experience that you can put to work. They have S curves too, and other employers’ absence of vision can be your gain. When you hire where others aren’t, the options aren’t picked over. They’re not overpriced. The candidates are often hungry and have something to prove.

As with the copper in Butte, Montana, raw materials of great value are found in unlikely places and may often be overlooked. Today, smartphones contain sixteen of the seventeen rare-earth metals, resources that were left behind in the waste rock of mining ventures until the advent of sophisticated electronics.²⁷ These elements are referred to as “rare” not because they are scarce (although a few of them are) but because they are dispersed throughout the earth’s crust, rather than concentrated in any one place. They may literally be found right under our feet, but they require unconventional methods to extract them. Valuable human resources are like this: if we are willing to be unconventional in our recruiting and hiring, we can discover and develop them. Seeking out what has been overlooked is the bedrock of innovation.

Summary

•Recruiting and hiring for an S curve strategy requires overhauling traditional practices. Conscious evaluation of functional capacity as well as desirable soft skills is essential. Also be sure to evaluate any emotional expectations that you may have attached to the new hire.

•Hire people who are willing to try new things and who aren’t afraid to start at the bottom of the S curve. Bring in managers who can spot talent, can help people move up the curve to mastery, and who are willing to sponsor and facilitate jumps to new curves.

•Look for expansive potential rather than proficiency. When we hire the “most qualified” candidate, we are choosing to shorten the period of high engagement. Plan to hire new recruits—or reassignments—at the low end of the S curve and to invest in their development as a resource.

•In addition to evaluating each position before recruiting and hiring, evaluate how your team is functioning before bringing in a new player.

•Recruiting from unconventional talent pools and hiring specifically for an S curve strategy means embracing market risk: playing where other employers disdain to play. This is where the greatest opportunity for a real win is found.

•Focus on long-term resource development. Evaluate for aptitude and willingness to engage in personal disruption. Craft job postings to encourage a wide range of people to apply.

If you'd like more tips on applying personal disruption to building an A-team, email me at [email protected] or sign up at whitneyjohnson.com