Latest / Integrity at Scale™ / Designing a Hiring System (Instead of Trusting Your Gut)
Transcript
- Hello, my friends Dr. Tara Vossenkemper here and you are listening to the Culture Focus Practice podcast. Thank you for joining me today. Look, hiring decisions are way, oh my gosh, way too high impact to rely solely on intuition. As much as I do love intuition, we need to know how we build a structured culture, protective hiring system that distributes the discernment across three key things, data process and team input. That's what we're doing today. We're going to be talking about designing a hiring system with these things in mind. Before we go further, of course, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. That way you get notified anytime new episodes drop and slash or you make it easier on yourself to find episodes that you wanna binge from previously. 📍 So here's our agenda for the day. Three items. Number one, your gut is not a soul hiring strategy. Number two. The core components of a real hiring system. And number three, protecting culture through distributed discernment. We are going to get right into 📍 things. Agenda item number one. Your gut is not a soul hiring strategy. Look, I love using my gut. Not only do I love food and love to eat, so I like using my gut in that way, but I also like using it as a source of data. Call it intuition, call it pattern recognition. Call it whatever the fuck you wanna call it. I don't really care. That's not the point. The point is that I do use my gut in terms of informing decisions. Here is a caveat, a very important caveat in using your gut. It can't be the sole decision maker. It is just a single point of data. It is information. I think you know as well as I do that our gut does feed us information about circumstances or people or processes or situations. But if we see it as the be all, end all, we're doing a disservice to ourselves, to our people, to our group. It's just one stream of data. That's it. It's just one stream of data. Any major decisions that we make, especially related to people joining the team, this is my own perspective obviously, those need to be informed by more than just what my gut tells me. This is for so many reasons, not least of which includes, I have my own history, like my own felt sense of living and being alive in this world and something with one person based on, I just know that type of person, so my level of comfort is really high with them, they're familiar, and so my gut has the potential to misconstrue familiarity with being good for the seat, that person being the right person for the seat that we need filled, that could be mistaken. And that is kind of tied in with my second point to this about your gut not being a sole hiring strategy. Comfort is not necessarily alignment, and so it could be that I have very high comfortability with the person, but that has little, if anything, to do with their alignment with the role that we need filled. So it's really common that leaders, you and me, I think a lot of us, mistake likability or a sense of familiarity or just ease in any conversation with cultural alignment. These are two very different things: Charisma or shared identity with somebody, those things can and often do cloud discernment. They cloud our ability to assess with accuracy whether or not this person is the right fit for your group. And I say right fit, that means a couple different things. One, of course, is that we're talking about from a cultural perspective. The other is that we're talking about a right fit for the seat. Can they actually do this job? Do they get it? Do they seem to want it, et cetera. Another reason why your gut should not be a soul hiring strategy is that you are highly likely not an island. I always think about, my husband will say, an eagle flies alone, Tara and I'm like, no, he fucking doesn't. Like that eagle had parent eagles that raised it, and there was typically two of them unless one dies. And then there's one that hunts and there's one that, you know, watches the nest, like, fuck you. No, that's not true. Maybe when it's flying, sure. Like it's flying by itself. But in terms of creating life and making sure that this baby eagle is gonna grow up and be able to fly, that's a team effort. Also, he's just joking when he says that stuff. So my point is the concept of a lone wolf is fucking garbage. No, that doesn't exist. It's so not the norm, so not the case. A lone wolf is probably a rabid wolf. Realistically, like it's a sick wolfs are pack creatures. What's my point? My point is that using your gut to make a decision about bringing somebody onto your team is basically relying on one data point that impacts every other single person around you. Hiring impacts your team significantly, and depending on your like station and location within the business, whether you're visionary consultant at this point, or owner operator, emphasis on the operator that hire highly likely impacts other people more than it does you directly on a day-to-day basis. I don't have much to do with my clinicians. I adore them, but I'm not interacting with them. That's my integrator. That's my DCO. That's my client care coordinator. That's my billing manager. That's my other clinical service providers. They're interacting with each other. I have very little to do with them on a day-to-day basis. To me, that feels unfair. Who am I to just use my gut to make a decision that impacts like so many other people. That's fucked up. That's not fair. I don't like it. I might again, use my gut as data because it is a single data point, but I also am not only going to solely use that as a hiring strategy or quite frankly, a decision maker. One other piece to the hiring, impacting your team more than it impacts you, again, not only this is why you shouldn't just use your gut or why your gut isn't a sole decision maker in this, we're excluding people from the discernment process. Like we're discerning whether or not to hire a person. We are quite literally centralizing a decision in our body. If we're using our gut, that should be distributed among others. A, we shouldn't be the only person making the decision. And B, we shouldn't only use one source of data, that source of data being our gut feelings about the decision. That is agenda 📍 item number one. Let's shift onto agenda item number two, the core components of a real hiring system. I love this actually. If you have a team, if you've been a part of any hiring process, you know as well as I do, it's a lot. It can be a large undertaking, even just getting everything scheduled. Honestly, it's a handful. It's a heaping dose of something. It's a big ask, however. I love thinking about the hiring process. To me, it's like the front loading of all of the work. So if you can bust your ass with regard to the process and figuring out what is it that we're looking for, what is it that we need, who fits best here? How do we assess that thing? Who are the people that have fallen through the cracks, or who are the people that have been a part of the team and then maybe left poorly or they didn't feel like a good fit, and then how did they fall through the cracks? All of those questions are about the hiring process. That's what I like to think about. So let's talk about, just broadly speaking, I'm not going to really get into depth because I could literally talk for hours about probably any one of these things. But let's talk broadly about the core components of a real hiring system. So first and foremost, we have to have a logistical and a structural match. I think this is really obvious, but I'm still going to say it. We need to A, be clear on what it is that we are seeking to hire. So not only from an accountability chart perspective. That's an EOS concept. For anybody who doesn't know, we need to know what is the seat and what are the core components, the core responsibilities, the core functions of that seat or role? You know, seat and role, you can use those interchangeably. And then once we have clarity on what that seat is, then we need to know, okay, what about scheduling? What about compensation? What about benefits? All of these things are logistical, so if for example, I need or want a clinical service provider for weekends or two evenings a week, or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday days, who, what the fuck ever, any specific thing that it is that we're looking for, and then a candidate comes through and they say, yeah, I really want a Friday afternoon, Thursday morning, Wednesday evening job, it's like, ooh, we need Monday, Tuesday, or we need Saturday, Sunday actually, or we need Tuesday, Monday evenings or whatever. My point is, it's just cut and dry like it's logistical. Do the aspects of the role that we need filled align with what it is that you're able to do, and not just in terms of scheduling, but again in terms of here are the benefits we offer, here's the compensation, here's everything you need to make this decision. Are you interested in pursuing this further and honestly, are we interested in pursuing you further? So it's like we're both dating each other, so to speak. So we really have to assure or ensure, I guess, one or both that there's a logistical and a structural match. I like to do that first. I want that done and out of the way because I would be fucking pissed if somebody was perfect in all ways. And then we get to the very end and they say. Yeah, I need to earn, you know, $300,000. Well, hell, I wish I would've known that in the beginning. 'cause that's not realistic at all. You won't even generate half that much revenue. Or maybe, but my point is that to me, is absolutely done first. What are the deal breakers? And let's just get those outta the way in the beginning. Next, we wanna do some sort of multi-layer assessment. So our multi-layer assessment is roughly speaking, three things. I'm saying three, but this is, just think like broad brush strokes. Three, not like very specific categories. Three. One is that I absolutely want to assess personality and by assess I don't mean make snap judgements on. I want to see a quantitative or more of a data oriented view about their personality. Some sort of personality assessment. I do like being efficacious, so we use a version of a big five assessment. That's what I'm after. I wanna know who are you, and quite frankly, if I have this data about you, and for example, let's say this person is really high in honesty, humility, which is actually part of the hexaco and one of the subdomains is sincerity. But when I meet them, I get the feeling that as like I'm speaking to the representative instead of speaking directly to them. That's not to say that they're not being sincere, but that is to say my gut is like I feel like there's distance here and more than what would be considered normal, you know. But this says you're really high in sincerity. And so that's curious. That's where something like that comes into play, because I might say to my leadership team, or I might say to my hiring committee, what was your read on sincerity with this person? And if they all say, man, I thought they were super authentic, 'cause one of our core values is authenticity and candor. That's a whole side conversation. Then I know, okay, well maybe that's just me. Like maybe there's something about this person that, I'm feeling a little disconnected, or they know that I'm the owner. Maybe they did put on airs a little bit or put a little bit of a front up because they're uncomfortable talking directly to me. Even if I'm trying to make them comfortable, like I'm trying to be approachable or I'm trying to be kind or whatever. They might just be a little bit uncomfortable. This is why I don't wanna use my gut if every other person is saying like, oh no, they were super authentic. Okay. It could just be me and specifically me in relation to them, or my assessment being influenced by my own history with somebody that is kinda like them. I mean, who knows what, but the mismatch is not necessarily the sole source of, well, I'm not hiring them. You know, it's just data. Okay, so we're using personality as one other assessment as one other means of assessing this person. We also, we, and I would encourage you also use our core values. So core values are how do I say this, assessed everywhere, like throughout the entire interview process from our meet and greet, which I'll talk about all the way through to the skills portion of the interview. Every single person who interacts with the candidate knows, because we have a hiring committee, a small group of folks, and they are onboarded. It's like you need to watch this training video. Here's some guidelines. But one of the things is in your interaction, be assessing through the lens of core values. As you interact with this person, be thinking about, am I seeing core values being played out with them? So values are part of the multi-layer assessment. We've got personality, which we do through literal assessment, like a scale or two. We have values, which are our own values, and we're doing this informally. Every interaction we have with this person, we're assessing informally and sometimes formally, we ask them very pointed questions that are values informed. What we're also doing is we're gonna do a skills assessment, and so this is where, in my mind, this is where rubber meets road. I don't honestly give a fuck what somebody, I hate resumes. I hate resumes so much. They're so flat and just dead. Like I, ugh, I hate them, hate them, hate them. Let's say resumes are important in terms of knowing, like, okay, well does this person have the education required to do the job? But even job hopping, I'm sort of like, ah, I don't care. I don't care if somebody job hops. Maybe all those other places fucking sucked. I would job hop too, if I kept getting hired at places where I was like, oh God, this sucks. Peace out. Like I'm not gonna stay, you know? My point is that I don't care what a resume looks like. I wanna know how a person, not only talks about the work, so we do something, we do a case conceptualization, like we give them a vignette. Everybody has access to the same vignette. This is for a clinical service provider. We ask them questions about how would you work with this person? Maybe about theoretical orientation, maybe about approach, things they might assess for. I wanna know , how do you think about the client that you're reading about? What is it that you would say is, the crux of the issue or some of the core components of what's going on in this person's life, how would you start working with them? What would done look like for them? A variety of questions, and then we do mock counseling or mock therapy. I want to know in practice, what does it look like for you to be in the chair, so to speak. And for those who dunno, I own a group therapy practice. So a lot of counselors, a lot of therapists, social workers, psychologists, et cetera, we're all actively doing therapy. And by all, I mean any clinical service provider, which is the bulk of the employees that I have, they're all actively doing therapy. I wanna know how they sit in the chair, who they are, how they show up, et cetera. What I'm also looking for is not only, just in general, the work that they're doing, but I'm looking for alignment, like they just talked about how they would approach a case. Do you see the same thing? When they're sitting in the chair and actually working with somebody. Like if they tell me, for example, they're really non-directive, let's say, like they don't ask a lot of like pointed questions or do a lot of focused questions, let's just go that route, but then in practice, all they're doing is sort of borderline interrogating the person in front of them, that tells me something. Again, this is a source of data. It's not the be all end all. Like, well, that's your answer. You know, don't hire them. It's just data. It's just data. So that's part of the multi-layer assessment though, is that we want personality aspect, we want a values aspect, and we want a skills aspect. Even if you're not hiring for a clinical service provider, let's say you're hiring for an operations manager or a client care coordinator, or a billing manager or specialist or assistant, or a marketing person, I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm going to do something that sort of forces the person to act out a skill that will be needed in the role that they have. Because I wanna know how rubber meets road. I wanna see them in action and does what they do match up with what they say. That's what I am in need of one other piece here to this like multi-layered assessment. I've known the entire time I've had a group practice and started hiring people that what I'm about to say was important, but I know now not necessarily why it's important. I just know now that it is really fucking important. Like it's always been important to me, but I just feel consistently validated that it is important. I would strongly encourage you after you do some sort of skills portion of the interview, to give feedback in a few different ways. If you're doing a clinical service provider interview, or somebody that is a provider who's gonna be, working with clients or consumers or whatever, I would do it in one specific way. First, I would have them self-assess. You wanna know from them first, so they're not influenced by anything that anybody else says, how they felt or thought about the work that they just did, even if it was mock counseling or mock therapy or mock whatever, doesn't fucking matter. Have them do self-assessment. How do you feel about what you just did? What would you do differently? What do you think you did especially well, and just a few minutes doing this, not like 30 minutes. Second, whoever they were interacting with during that mock, whatever, the mock therapy, that client, that pseudo client then gives feedback on the felt experience of being a client with this candidate. What was it like being a client? Did you feel seen? Did you feel heard? Did you feel like the things you needed to talk about were being, supported or massaged out or what have you, you know, whatever language you wanna ask. You're not asking the client to give feedback on skills. You're asking them to give feedback on the felt experience of being a client with that person because you are serving clients. Again, if you're a group therapy practice, let's assume that you are, you're serving clients. So what's it like to be a client with this person? Third round of feedback, you're doing three ways. So the candidate goes first, then the mock client, then you are doing the other people, and this is where the skills portion of the feedback comes into play. So we typically will do, our leadership team will give feedback first, anybody who's clinically oriented, and then we'll open it up for others. And this to me is just so fucking important, because I wanna know how does this person respond to feedback. If somebody says to me, man, I really need more feedback in my life. Like I have been in environments that haven't felt very supportive. I've asked for feedback and I haven't gotten it. I really wanna grow and develop as a provider, as a clinician, as a therapist. Okay. That's them telling me one thing when I go to give them feedback, and I am saying at this point, this thing happened, I wonder what you were thinking or why did you do this? Or, I was wondering if blah, blah, blah, or you missed the mark here. It should have been dot, dot fill in the blank and they shut down or they withdraw or they double down and say, well, I didn't wanna do that because fill in the blank, whatever. If I can start to see them either getting real defensive as a response or just pacifying the people who are giving feedback, that to me is problematic. Now, let me throw out a caveat. What I'm not saying is that. They should have done all of the things that the people giving feedback are saying. What I am saying is that if three or four people are giving the same feedback that the candidate really missed some very obvious feeling reflections, kind of basic therapy, micro skills for those who don't know and the candidate is still a little bit defensive and resistant to that being an option or that being a thing that's a problem. What I'm not saying is that every type of feedback that's being given needs to be like, oh my gosh, I absolutely missed it. I should have done it. Oh, thank you so much. That's not what I'm saying. You don't need them to be like groveling or something like that, but you want to have candidates that are actually open to feedback. I want to hear, if I'm doing mock therapy, I do want to know what's it like for this client and what did the people around me witness? And in my mind, that also can be a discussion where if somebody gives me feedback, I might say, oh wow. Like, I don't think I had thought about that. Here's what I was thinking. But I can't understand why you would think that thing. And if I can say you know what I didn't do that because I was actually trying to do this. That to me is still being open to feedback. It's taking in like, yeah, I hear what you're saying. Here's what I was trying to go for. That's different than somebody shutting down and being defensive. Defensiveness, in my mind would look more like, well, yeah, but that wasn't gonna work. That's a little bit like, goodness. You know, someone just hitting it back. I knew that wouldn't work, so why would I do that? There's like, tone, affect, somebody actually taking in something and thinking about it before sending another message back. I don't need to keep talking about defensiveness. My point is, though, that you want to give feedback because if somebody says that they're really open and they really want feedback, and then they're presented with some feedback from people who've been in the field for many years, for the record, I'm not talking about a pre-licensed professional who's saying, well, you should have done this. I'm talking about folks who have been doing the work for a long time and they shut down or they get defensive, it's opposite. What they're saying is not actually how they're behaving, and that is a, I don't wanna say red flag, but a little red flag in the ground, you know? One final core component of a real hiring system, quantitative team feedback with a very explicit question about recommendation. So after the entire interview process from start to finish, what I do or what my integrator does at this point, we send out a post interview survey, so every single person who took part then completes a survey. What we're trying to do is get numbers. What is your, you know, your quantitative input about this person with regard to each of the components in regard to the core values, there's options, of course, for filling in the blanks. If you have more to say, add it here, something like that. And then importantly, at the very end, we say, what is your recommendation about this person for hiring? And the options are, recommend, recommend with reservation, do not recommend. If they choose, recommend with reservation or do not recommend. They have to add a blurb about why., Especially with the reservation piece, like what is the reservation? Clarify here. What this does is it turns a debrief or like kind of a vague impression into usable data. If I have six of these interview surveys completed and everybody is glowing and there's everybody saying recommend highly, we love this person. And maybe my gut's like, I still feel a little off about this person. Guess what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna defer to the group. I'm not going to use my gut to make that decision. I'm gonna defer to the 📍 group. So I'm gonna keep going then because I'm starting to talk through culture. And the third agenda item is protecting culture through distributed discernment. Here's what I mean by this. It's a little bit like the wisdom of the masses. Like you're trying to use your group to inform the decision so that you are not centralizing the decision based on a source of data or maybe your gut or like a misalignment between your perception of them and then also some sort of data on the hexaco, for example, or on the personality assessment. So there's a few different ways you can protect the culture through this distributed discernment. One is through a leadership excluded meet and greet. This is after the phone screen, before the skills portion. We have like an hour of meet and greet. There is no agenda. There are no specific questions. It's not recorded and there's no leadership allowed. This is where candidates come and they interact with a couple of committee members from the hiring committee. The idea here is that candidates and hiring committee can all speak freely. I don't want anybody to feel encumbered by some sort of power differential. I don't want any leadership team member there, and I don't want people to feel like they have to hold back. I want it to be an honest discussion amongst these people. And then I trust that my hiring committee is gonna be honest in that post-interview survey, and they're gonna let me know based on the meet and greet, they're gonna rate this, they're gonna rate the values, and they're gonna make a recommendation. I don't need to know. I don't need to know what they talk about. What I wanna know instead is. Do they align with us? Do you recommend that they work here? Second component to protecting culture through the distributed discernment is that a skills evaluation really helps to prevent charisma bias or charm bias, or confidence bias. So if somebody seems really confident and they talk a good game, and then you see them work and they are, ooh, they need a lot of work. If you are just going based on what somebody says, you're hiring based on narrative. You're not hiring based on competence. And so when you are doing a skills component, some people they feel uncomfortable. Usually at the end, people say how fun the experience was, but like stepping in, it's kind of scary. It's a little bit overwhelming. I mean, it's a fucking interview. You know, any interview is a little bit overwhelming, but whenever you are doing something like this, unless you see somebody in action, you don't actually know what they're like. I could tell you anything. I could talk to you about how I would do brain surgery, but I've never, ever drilled into somebody's head or sliced them open with a scalpel. It's never happened, but I could talk to you about the somatic sensory motor strip and if I was gonna do some sort of sensory effective surgery. Maybe I could talk, I could talk a good game about the therapeutic work I might do, but then you see me in action and you're like, what the fuck? Whoa, this is really poor quality based on the stuff that we're looking for. That's why we do a skills assessment because it prevents against that bias that we might have based on the somebody's narrative and the way that somebody's presenting. Another piece to the skills eval and charm bias protection is that, the role play and the feedback, specifically the feedback, I told you this was important to me. It remains very important that reveals people's capacity under pressure. It reveals some ego distortion under pressure. That's what I want. I don't want it to just be all smiles and sunshine and like, oh, good job, champ. Thanks for showing up. No, I want you to know, okay, well as I'm watching, this is what I was thinking about the work. I wanna know how is somebody going to respond if I'm giving authentic and candid, which is a value feedback. I'm being kind, but I'm also being direct and I'm not ever shitting on somebody's character at all. It's all based on skills. Let's talk about micro skills. Let's talk about open questions. Let's talk about meaning, reflections, or feeling reflections or paraphrasing basic micro skills. I'm giving as objective as possible feedback on what it is that I'm seeing. How does a person respond? When we do give feedback in those walls can feel like they're like closing in on somebody to what extent does their ego become distorted? That's what I'm after. I wanna know, can they hold true to themselves, even under the pressure of receiving this feedback? That is done kindly. Super important. We're not trying to scare people away, we're trying to be kind and we're trying to be honest. So third component to protecting culture through distributed discernment is systems, broadly speaking, are gonna help you reduce your regret. This is not to say that you're not gonna have misses, you are gonna still hire people that you probably look back and you're like, ah, fucking hell. Why did I do that? Like, why did we bring that person on? They were not a fit. Cool. Use that data to then tweak your hiring process, but when you have a structure, a process, a relatively stable flow, your decisions are not reactive. They're not personal, they're not biased. They are as objective as they can possibly be distributed amongst people that you trust, because I'm assuming your hiring committee, the people involved are gonna be folks that you trust. So we are saying, I'm taking this decision away from my gut. I'm pulling it out, and I'm setting it here. Almost like dripping dye into a bowl of water. It's going to dissipate and distribute to everybody, all the other molecules in this water. It's not just living with me. That's what I want. Because if I can do that, then I know the weight of it is now distributed as well. It still is liability wise, financially, of course, it's like falls back on the owner and the weight of making the decision and assessing the people coming through that is distributed and that is a fucking relief man. That's a huge relief, especially if you can trust the process and you trust the people who are involved in the process with you. Boom. That's your setup for success. I seriously have so man, so freaking much more to say about this. I could talk for literal hours, like literally I could talk for hours 📍 about this. I want to hear from you what are the stuck points that you have in your hiring process, and from there I would be interested in doing episodes, speaking directly to some of the issues that you're having, whether you send me your own scenario and I can talk out loud about it, or you specifically say this, this, and this, and I can tell you or do an episode on how to address these key things. The reality is that whatever it is that you're experiencing, highly likely it's universal. So you're not in it alone. The issues that you have with hiring are probably welcome to the fucking club. You know, like everybody's gonna have similar issues. So send me what you think. If you go to my website, taravossenkemper.com, go to contact and then do a form submission and send me some information about what it is that you're struggling with? What are some of the stuck points for 📍 hiring? Let's talk takeaways before we bounce. So number one, your gut is data, not strategy. If you tell me no, my gut is always right. No, it's fucking not start tracking that, turn that into a number, and then come back to me in, 10 hires and tell me if that's actually true or not. If it is incredible. And then you can teach me your ways. And if not, ooh, I'm not gonna say I told you so, but I'm gonna say your gut should not be your sole strategy. Second takeaway, hiring is too high impact for a single point decision making. It should not live solely with one person, and it should not live solely with your gut. Third takeaway, A real hiring system will distribute discernment across culture skills, values alignment and importantly, team input. Lastly, culture is protected by process, not instinct. So I really like that component actually. Again, to me I think that feels relieving, which is funny because I'm very protective of culture, but at some point, and maybe for most of the existence of my group culture has felt like it's been distributed. Like we bring people on and now they house. Like they carry some of the weight of culture because they're a part of us. So not only are you feeding into culture, but you're also being impacted by it. And thus like you are embedded into the system. Now you are carrying this with us. Even if I am the sort of custodian of culture, so to speak, , I have my eyes on the prize or my finger on the pulse of it on a consistent basis. The reality is like I'm not the sole decision maker with regard to things that impact culture, that it is a team effort, ooh, man. That's it for today. Thank you. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for caring enough about your culture to design hiring intentionally. Super, fucking important and really that's it. Like I said, you hit me up with your hiring stuck points, and I will ideally help you out with some sort of. Response episode. So it's been great seeing you. I will see you in the next episode. Thanks. Bye.