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Chapter 31
Bet on Talent

Continuously recruiting for your talent bench is the foundation for building extraordinary teams because extraordinary teams cannot exist without the right people. How are you defining the “right people” for your team? And what is the payoff for betting on talent? The stories and lessons of this chapter answer those questions.

Affirmative Action Quotas

In 1979, I moved to Atlantic City, New Jersey, to begin a new job as vice president of human resources for the Playboy Hotel and Casino, which was under construction. Those were heady days in Atlantic City. Too many casinos to count were also under construction. It was a genuine boomtown. There were cranes everywhere you looked. Tens of thousands of jobs were being created. It was very exciting to be a part of it.

The State of New Jersey authorized casino gaming not only to accomplish economic goals, but also to accomplish social goals. Understandably, the state wanted to ensure that casinos would work aggressively to achieve ethnic, racial, and gender diversity among their employee populations. It might seem hard to believe now, but we had to achieve certain quotas to be granted a license to operate our casino.

One day, the gaming commission called me to ask who was going to be in charge of our affirmative action program. I told them that the assistant director of human resources would have that as one of her responsibilities. They informed me that that was unacceptable. If we wanted our license, we would have to staff a person whose only responsibility was affirmative action. All casinos had the same requirement.

All the other casinos hired experts from all over the country to head up their affirmative action programs. These experts typically possessed advanced degrees and had studied affirmative action and diversity extensively. They were honestly impressive individuals. They knew affirmative action backward and forward.

I hired a local used car salesman named Ron. He did not have an advanced degree. He had no formal expertise in affirmative action. But in addition to selling cars, Ron was a community activist and leader. He was extremely well connected in Atlantic City. He knew how to get things done in that town. He could make a few phone calls, and the right candidates would show up to fill our quotas.

Ron outperformed all those experts with all those credentials because at the end of the day, their academic knowledge did not really matter. The gaming commission was interested in only one thing: Did you fill your quotas?

How necessary are the requirements you have for various jobs on your team or in your organization? It is not unusual to see a requirement for a college degree when a degree is not really necessary to do the job with excellence. Another common but unnecessary requirement: A minimum amount of experience. However, for entry-level, rank and file jobs, experience is not that important. In fact, lack of experience is the only deficiency that corrects itself over time. If you hire someone with no experience today, two years from now, he or she will have two years of experience.

Unnecessary requirements can also limit the diversity of your talent pool, as this next story illustrates.

The Female Doorman

The Omni International Hotel in Norfolk, Virginia, had an opening for a doorman, for which they advertised in the paper (this was before online recruiting was possible). At that time, I was the corporate director of human resources. I received a complaint from an individual who had been turned down for the job. She felt she had been the victim of illegal discrimination because she was a woman.

I immediately found her complaint to be credible. At that time, it was very unusual to see a female doorman—or door person. So there was clearly some sort of institutional bias at work, whether it was conscious or not.

In this instance, the front office manager was the hiring manager. I called him to discuss the decision. He reported that the uniforms they had would not fit her. They would all be too big (because only men had been doing that job). However, this was a luxury hotel. They had a seamstress on staff for the express purpose of making uniforms fit properly.

I said, “What else do you have?”

He replied, “The job requires the employee to lift heavy luggage out of the trunk of a car. She wouldn't be able to do that.”

I am not making this next part up. I swear. I had obtained from human resources a copy of her job application. I said, “Did you look at the hobbies she listed? The first one is ‘weight lifting.’” Honest to God.

He gave up, and at my direction, they hired her. On her first day of work, she garnered terrific PR for the hotel. Because a female doorperson was so rare, a reporter wrote an article about it. Her presence in that role became a unique feature of the hotel.

But how can you really know whether someone can do the job? Best practice includes scientific assessment as a step in the selection process. The following story illustrates how scientific assessment can improve both the diversity of the people you hire and the odds that they will be top performers.

The Portman Hotel

In the 1980s, John Portman, famous architect and real estate developer, decided to build a hotel in San Francisco. For marketing and branding purposes, the hotel became a member of the Peninsula Hotel Group. That membership required us to provide butler-style service to all guests. To provide that service, we need to find people who could clean a guestroom at the same level of quality as a housekeeper in a five-star hotel and who had the guest relations skills of a top-level waiter or concierge, and who liked to do both every day.

If you ask most hoteliers, they will tell you that the people cleaning toilets generally prefer to avoid face-to-face guest service, and the people personally serving the guests do not want to clean toilets every day. So we faced a dilemma.

Traditional approaches to recruiting and selecting employees would not find people with the particular combination of talent we needed, so I started searching for alternative methods. I found a group of people who said, “We can absolutely help you identify people like that because we measure aptitude, which is independent of experience, knowledge, and expertise. Through the use of our scientific assessments, we will tell you whether someone has the talent to do that job with excellence and whether they will enjoy it. You just have to be willing to give them the training and knowledge they need to succeed in the job.”

After learning more about their approach, we decided to partner with this group, which at the time was known as Selection Research Incorporated. We decided that for entry-level positions and for first-line supervisors, we would not require any experience, and we would base our hiring decisions on talent as measured by their assessments.

Because experience was no longer a factor, we contacted all the organizations in San Francisco whose mission included helping their constituents find jobs. We said, “Send your people. No experience necessary.” And send people they did.

We assessed about 9,500 candidates to hire 350 people for the opening of this hotel. The results were remarkable. Because we focused on talent rather than knowledge and experience, some of the most common barriers to employment disappeared. The assessment also reduced the subjectivity of the interviewers.

One of the most surprising outcomes was that the demographics of our 350-person staff was to the percentage point the demographics of the city of San Francisco. And, as you know, San Francisco is extremely diverse.

Experiment: Identify Hiring Criteria That Really Matter

To know what a great candidate looks like for a particular job, you need to invest some time to understand what a top performer looks like in that job.

Think about the best performer you have ever personally worked with in that job.
Make a list of not more than 10 things that made that person such an outstanding performer.
Circle the three items that contributed most to their exemplary performance.
Ask a few coworkers to do this.
Identify the items that come up with the greatest frequency.
As you interview candidates, downplay experience and education, and focus on the items from the preceding step on this list. Focus on them in reference checks as well.
After you've hired three people using this approach, review how it has worked for you.

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Table of Contents for Chapter 31: Bet on Talent

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Table of Contents for
Chapter 31: Bet on Talent