In this episode, we sit down with Susan Bellows of Susan Bellows and Associates to discuss best hiring practices, communication and speaking to your candidate’s needs, and finding an “A” player by refining your interview skills.
Susan is a business consultant specializing in empowering middle management women to attain the recognition, respect, and rewards they deserve. Most of her career was spent as a consultant, coach, and trainer for businesses, helping with sales, customer service, and team building.
She holds three special designations: CPBA (Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst), CPVA (Certified Professional Values Analyst), and CPTA (Certified Professional TriMetrix® Analyst) which enables her to help businesses “look under the hood” using assessments similar to an MRI before hiring a candidate or considering promoting a current employee.
Transcript
Fletcher:
Thank you for joining the Higher Talents podcast. Straight forward hiring and recruiting advice for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs. And today I’m really happy to have Susan Bellows with us, she is an executive coach, specializes in working with women in the middle management and helping them get to the next level in their career both professionally and personally. I think that’s really important topic and looking forward to having the conversation with her today about her best hiring practices. So before we get into that Susan please tells us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got to where you’re at today.
Susan:
Thank you, thank you Fletcher. It’s a delight to be on the phone with you. It’s ironic, I went to college in Boston way back when, if you were a woman you either had to be a secretary, teacher, you could work in retail or you could go into nursing so I got –
Fletcher:
Limited options there.
Susan:
So I started out as a secretary but obviously I was quite qualified and I kept getting promoted but it was just fascinating to watch all the years where I was an employee and I was a bad fit and then later when I was a consultant and I would be inside and typically they would call me and say we need you to deal with and the person was typically an A player but they weren’t a team player and they were a bad fit for the culture that they had been brought into. And then I would interview, I would almost always go in and interview the employees if I were gonna do any remediation and over and over again the employees would say one thing and they were extremely credible and they were accurate from their point of view but I then talk to the management about the person and they would give me a totally different picture, like the start person also doesn’t show up five days out of six.
Fletcher:
Yeah, yeah.
Susan:
Anyway so I now say everyone is a 100% accurate from their point of view because they are.
Fletcher:
Yeah. And that’s why we wanted to talk to you today because I think you have a unique perspective about that. I think it’s so important understanding the other person’s point of view and I think a lot of people think about this in terms of emotional intelligence of great communication skills and others of us and even myself miss it completely at times. I just can’t get out of my own way. Can’t get out of my own head, and this is my point of view or the highway so it’s not an easy thing to do even if you’re aware of it. Again, that’s why I was really excited to have you on today because you’ve taken the time to really study both sides and I love the conclusion, everybody’s a 100% accurate from their point of view. So what do we do with that information? What does that mean to us now moving forward?
Susan:
Well this is the thing most people who are running companies or who have higher level positions are, I don’t wanna use jargon, but they’re high D, high dominate, they walk fast, they talk fast, they make decisions quickly and the worker bees, the rollers, are typically supporter. They need you to say thank you. They need you to value them, to appreciate that they will work 24 hours a day but they need … they don’t even wanna be in front of the room getting applause, they just want someone to say I appreciate this or thank you. I did a workshop for a company and so we did this whole thing with a different styles and the top people, all the people that ran the company were on one side and all the employees were diagonally across because that’s typical, the worker bees are very different styles than the owners. And so [crosstalk 00:04:38] …
Fletcher:
Exact contrast, right?
Susan:
Exactly, exactly. So I said, and I was talking to the worker bees and I said what is it you need from them, the management? And they said we just need to know that they appreciate us. And the management they’re jaws dropped. They couldn’t understand that that’s all these people wanted.
Fletcher:
Yeah just a little bit of recognition and they were happy.
Susan:
And it isn’t even recognition, it’s the thank you, I appreciate what you did. Because what I find someone who’s a high supporter, the typical worker bee, not an A player but I’m talking about the worker bee, they don’t really wanna be in front of the group because then they have that thought like people are gonna think I’m better than they are and they would rather be behind the scenes doing a good job but have someone acknowledge, like a little sticky note, I don’t know about you, I don’t know how many other places you ever worked but [crosstalk 00:05:36] …
Fletcher:
So acknowledgment over recognition [crosstalk 00:05:39] … Yeah, very different, okay. Yeah I would never have drawn that conclusion or seen the difference between that unless you had pointed that out.
Susan:
This is the thing, the person who’s the hiring manager are typically an A player, they want the gold star, they want to be on the cover of the newsletter or the company magazine but the people who are really the team, the ones who are doing a lot of gut work that other people don’t wanna do, they do not want that kind of visibly, they want to be part of the the team. I used to do a lot of work for banks and I’d go in and I’d work with each of the departments and I’d say okay, what do you want for your group if you meet their particular goals that you have set for your team? And it was amazing to me they would say things like well we just wanna go out to dinner with each other. We just want the bank to pay for us to go out to dinner with each other. They actually wanted to be with each other.
Fletcher:
[crosstalk 00:06:44] … like each others company.
Susan:
And that wasn’t something I cared about. Don’t make me be with all those people and go out with them. I wanna be off doing something else but that’s the other thing, even rewarding people, asking the people what it is they want. A range of things from movie tickets to car washes instead of what I, the head of the company or the senior management team, thinks that the people are going to want.
Fletcher:
[crosstalk 00:07:15] … A simple pizza party might go a long ways and probably be a lot less expensive than a big bonus maybe.
Susan:
That’s the thing that was so interesting. I work in a bank and I was up on the balcony looking down and I watched the customer service people, they were hiding under the desk when the customers came in and I found out they’d never been trained in the products and they had no brochures so we started holding product information sessions and it turned out when I out a basket of quarters on the table so that they could go to the vending machine and get Coke and other things, they thought that was the best thing ever.
Fletcher:
Yeah. Something as simple as free snacks.
Susan:
Yeah, yeah.
Fletcher:
Yeah. Awesome, yeah. So how do we take this concept of really needing, especially from a leadership perspective, needing to try to understand the perspective of the people on our team, how do you take that into the hiring process because now we’re talking about trying to understand the perspective of the candidate who’s coming and considering working for our company, right?
Susan:
Yes, yes, yes. And this is a low level example but I met someone last night, he has a big metal company, a very successful metal company, regular metal and scrap metal and I asked what the biggest challenges with hiring was for him and he said getting truck drivers. And then I had seen that thing on Better Team where they had this special way, if you’re trying to get somebody like a truck driver you aim for things that a truck driver would want. No overnights, up-to-date trucks and something else that a truck driver would want, not what you think they would want. And all the people I have been interviewing over time, more and more of what they say is I wanna reasonable salary but I want all these other things instead like autonomy, freedom, flexibility, somebody who has my back, I wanna feel valued, I wanna know that I’m gonna keep growing, going, going up the ladder but also learning, I’m gonna be challenged, I’m gonna know what success looks like instead of having people talk behind my back they’re gonna talk to me directly, I’m going to have access to management so that if I have a great idea somebody else doesn’t take credit for it or if I have a concern I can talk to the management and talk about my concern instead of that total hierarchy or hierarchical, the old fashioned [crosstalk 00:10:05] ….
Fletcher:
Talk down approach, pushing down on people, right?
Susan:
Yes. Well and again that’s still the norm in big insurance companies and big banks and that kinda thing. From what I’m gathering it’s changing. The organizations are flattening out and people could actually have access to management without having it look like you went over your bosses head.
Fletcher:
Yeah.
Susan:
But if you were having one on ones with your boss regularly, if that was part of the culture then, and if everybody had been trained in communication skills and listening skills.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So you really have to set the groundwork to provide many of these intangible experiences for candidates to then become employees so that when you’re out there recruiting there’s already a culture of the organization that has a clear path for career advancement that has an open door policy that maybe has addressed some of the common challenges in the workplace like the example of the truck drivers, we’ve already created maybe an infrastructure where there are no overnights or there’s minimal number of overnights and you can share that with people. So by understanding what the best people in the market are looking for you can either take the benefits that you already have that address those and share those stories with those people or you can learn how to adjust your won workplace.
Susan:
Yes, yes. Adjusting the workplace is much harder as you can imagine.
Fletcher:
How do I change, if we have overnights and that’s just part of our culture or just part of the way the structure of our organization is as a logistic company, that might everybody a very difficult thing for me to change, right?
Susan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). But again you might have something else that would be really appealing. I don’t know what that might be for a truck driver but that’s the other thing, interviewing people who are actually doing that job and finding out … getting a cross section of opinions to find out what is important to a group of people and then looking at what you can offer.
Fletcher:
Yeah. It’s like a market analysis, right? If you were starting a marketing strategy except for now you’re doing this in the hiring process.
Susan:
Exactly.
Fletcher:
How many people do you think, a manager, a leader, needs to interview in order to become proficient at interviewing or to gather enough information about the candidate marketplace so that they could then make these decisions? Is five people enough or should they be shooting for 10, 20, 50?
Susan:
You have written an e-book called How to find out if your perfect candidate leaves the toilet seat up and it’s a way to get reference checks.
Fletcher:
Yep.
Susan:
And then you have another booklet about interviewing skills. If people would read those types of documents and ask questions that would give them the right kind of information they wouldn’t have to see so many candidates. First of all, I’m in western Massachusetts which is not Boston, it’s not New York and it’s even not Hartford and trying to get people to come here to work is very difficult and the salaries are a lot lower but so are the housing costs and there’s no traffic jam at night and all that stuff.
Fletcher:
The talent pool is very small.
Susan:
Exactly.
Fletcher:
You’re gonna have a difficult time for recruiting outside of the area, so there’s not that many people in the area necessarily to begin with so you may have a limited number of people to survey or to interview for practice. So maybe practice by studying, doing your homework and learning some strategies that allow you to get more information more quickly and in a more effective manner. And you’ve been through a lot of large corporation, right?
Susan:
Yes.
Fletcher:
Throughout your career about professionally working for them as well as consulting for them, right.
Susan:
Yeah, yes.
Fletcher:
How many new leaders get training on how to interview?
Susan:
I don’t think they get any, I really don’t. I just remember the first time … I was looking for another job, I graduated from [inaudible 00:14:52] which is a college in Boston and I went back to their alumni office and I watched a video on interviewing-
Fletcher:
There you go.
Susan:
… and they said … Yeah. They said when they ask you questions like so, tell me about da, da, da, and my reaction was it’s on my resume, didn’t you read my resume? And what they said in the video was-
Fletcher:
I’ve had candidates say that to me.
Susan:
They’re just trying to open you up to find out who you are. But I mean again there are ways of doing that. You’re familiar with all the top grading, Brad Smart material, and there are like three or four questions just for phone interviews that you can do before you ever … I mean you scan through the resume and you make sure that you get your resume on enough job boards that … and it’s not a job description, it says things like no overnights. It aims at the needs of the person you’re trying to attract.
Fletcher:
It’s an advertisement.
Susan:
It is, it is.
Fletcher:
There’s a big difference between the job description and the job advertisement that’s used to attract the talent, right?
Susan:
Absolutely, absolutely. And if you’ve done the job analysis, that’s the other thing, you wanna be sure that you’ve analyzed the job so you know what the key accountabilities are for the job.
Fletcher:
I’m glad you bring that up. I think many of us struggle with that because a lot of times we’re in business, we’re running, we’re running, all of sudden we say oh an administrative person just left, I need to get another one, let’s put an ad up and off we go but there’s very little thought about what is this job actually, right?
Susan:
Why does the job exist?
Fletcher:
Why does it exist, right? And so job analysis is the formal term for creating a job description or understanding what the job is, right? So what are four things that you should do to quickly do a job analysis that will get you 50 years down the field closer to the end zone on completing a thorough one? These can be [inaudible 00:17:19] documents, right?
Susan:
Right, right, right. Well I mean the quickest thing I’ve ever done because I’m certified to do a process called job benchmarking but most people don’t wanna spend the time so-
Fletcher:
What’s the difference between job benchmarking and analysis?
Susan:
Job benchmarking is you bring in four to six subject matter experts, people who have done the job, interact with the person who will be doing the job, that kind of thing and you have them answer questions. It’s an online assessment about the job, if something is an A priority, B priority and then a template comes out of the computer and then you talk to that group again and you say okay let’s narrow this down, one person thought this was the most important thing and the president thought it was the least important thing so let’s fine tune that. And then you know have a template for the kinds of behaviors, motivators or driving forces, soft skills, competency, that you need for someone to be successful on this job. That’s one way.
Fletcher:
So how long does that take you think?
Susan:
Well there’s a fast way, you can do it in a couple of days if the employer were cooperative and the subject matter experts would answer the questions and then they could get them on-
Fletcher:
I mean these are people inside the organization, right?
Susan:
Oh yes, yes, yes.
Fletcher:
Pretty much so it’s not like you have to go find an expert, right? You’ve got them right there in house.
Susan:
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. So that’s one thing and it can take, it depends on who’s administering it but it can be done fairly quickly and fairly inexpensively.
Fletcher:
Yeah. And each party only needs to spend what, 15 minutes?
Susan:
I don’t know. Well maybe half hour to answer the questions thoroughly and then they need to come back together, again they can do it all online, they come back together and there’s some brainstorming about what we saw here, so and so thought it was number one but let’s figure out what it really is. Then you narrow it down to what are the very key accountabilities and what percentage of the time will the person be spending … you rank the key accountabilities and there were like three and you estimate how much time a person would be spending on the key accountabilities as well. So that’s the ideal benchmarking, that’s called job benchmarking.
Fletcher:
Because there’s the perceived importance and then the time that’s spent doing that. It’s maybe a more objective measurement, right? So if you think the thing that you spend 3% of your time doing is the most important maybe there’s some of the balance that needs to be inspected there.
Susan:
I did job benchmarking for a company that was most sales people and the people who were selling were spending most of their time doing paperwork so they had to change what was going on if they wanted to get the results from the sales people.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So management and the sales people they both said paperwork is what we’re spending the most amount of time on, did they think it was the mos the important thing as well or did they recognize-
Susan:
No, no.
Fletcher:
Okay.
Susan:
That’s what we discovered by doing the job benchmark that the bulk of their time was spent with paperwork. But a much simpler benchmark was, it was a company that was all sales and I assessed the management team to see what they, a profile on average, what they look like. And of the behavior style every single one of them … Okay, so there was seven people, six of them had competitiveness as 10 out of 10. And an example inside the culture, this is an example of the culture, they had a big cow bell on the ceiling and anytime anyone closed a sale they would hit the cow bell. So they then … it wasn’t the best benchmark in the world but we now knew what behaviors and motivators, like the motivators, are they motivated by money, are they motivated by power, are they motivated by things that the job required and then they said that while they were interviewing people to find the right person for their culture with that competitiveness and needing to … and you can earn a lot of money in that particular company if you sold.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So you guys recognized the competitiveness was the most important, behavior and kinda attribute and obviously it was raining through the culture of organization so yeah you might wanna look for people who get really upset when they lose card games or board games, college athletes.
Susan:
Well again it was just the question of using an assessment, we could tell when they found a resume that looked like a likely candidate they would just assess the person and they would know whether or not the person would be a good fit so they didn’t even bother to have them some in for an interview.
Fletcher:
Yeah, yeah. So yeah you’re using assessment to compare against the benchmarks, the position benchmarks and the job analysis and match those with those key behaviors then it definitely streamlines the process and makes it pretty easy for folks. Yeah.
Susan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Fletcher:
That’s very interesting. So it doesn’t take very much time to do a job benchmark, it takes a little bit of collaboration, it involves a few different people but the benefit is enormous. It’s like in marketing or sales, a lot of our audience are entrepreneurs and they spend a lot of time doing these things, if you don’t know who your target audience is you’re not as likely to hit your target, right? It’s more like shooting a shotgun and just oops accidentally I got the person I was looking for as opposed to honing in and laser focused on the ideal target, right?
Susan:
Yes. And the likelihood … if you’re not doing assessments and your company, your whole thing is preemployment assessments, if you’re not doing assessments the likelihood of getting a good hire is like flipping a coin.
Fletcher:
Yeah. It’s very difficult to really understand those behaviors. I guess that goes back to nobody ever teaches us how to be an interviewer. We get taught a lot on how to interview for jobs, right?
Susan:
Yes.
Fletcher:
As you highlighted earlier, but nobody ever trains us to be interviewers and nor to many of us have the opportunity to practice very much. This is one of the things I’ve found throughout my career, now I’ve made it a point to interview a lot of people just because I’m crazy about it. Recently hit over the 8,000 mark but most people aren’t gonna have that opportunity so an assessment is a really good way to more objectively evaluate the behavioral aspects that are difficult to uncover from a traditional interview.
Susan:
Yes.
Fletcher:
So you bring up in our pre-meeting notes here a pretty interesting point, that you can’t always expect to hire A players, that there’s a place for potentially B players in an organization. Tell me what you mean about that and tell me more about that.
Susan:
Okay. First of all A players do not want to have a bunch of A players because then they can’t be the star and they also need B players to do the work so they can be out being stars but they need people behind the scenes that are following up with all the things that need to be taken care of. People that are reliable and are gonna get the job done and are not gonna complain.
Fletcher:
So are you referring to A players as this typical type A dominate personality type or versus the more supportive type?
Susan:
I don’t see A players typically as the supportive types. They don’t really care that much about getting ahead. They don’t care about being leaders. They don’t care about the recognition. They don’t care about earning more money. [crosstalk 00:26:21] … I know I’m generalizing.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So how do you define what an A player is? That really could change based on your job benchmarking, your job analysis to, right?
Susan:
It would depend on a lot of variables. All these people that I’ve talked to, just in the last few days and last night when I was at this conference it was also a hiring agency that was at the table where I was sitting and so I just … a frustrated interviewer so I like to keep asking people questions and a lot of the people I know how are A players, they get the job done not matter what. It doesn’t have to be someone who knocks everybody down on the football field, it just has to be someone whose personal accountability if off the charts and gets along with other people and can get the job done. Because a lot of A players don’t get along with other people.
Fletcher:
And that’s a pretty good general kind of description of what most people are probably looking for in an A player, right? Aside from the job specifics, right? This resonated with me, I was talking to somebody in our entrepreneurial groups here not to long ago and they reminded me of something that came out of top grading is an A player is the best available talent for the price that you’re willing to pay in the market.
Susan:
That’s great. That’s great. That’s great. Yes.
Fletcher:
I think like you’re describing, I think that’s what we all think of as an A player, right? No matter what they get the job done, they’re winners or successful, whatever it is that they do, they’re top achievers no matter what in whatever the role is whether it’s a sales role or a customer service role, right?
Susan:
Yes, yes.
Fletcher:
So those could be two different personalities to, right?
Susan:
Yes, yes.
Fletcher:
Customer service have a more maybe supportive personality versus the sales person maybe a little more dominate.
Susan:
Right, right.
Fletcher:
But you always have to layer these other two factors on there, what’s available in the marketplace and what you’re willing to pay for that talent.
Susan:
Yes.
Fletcher:
So maybe I think with the top grading guys really are talking about here is my A player might be different than your A player. My B player might be different than your C player but we have to come to terms and have a recognition of what that is for ourselves and define what those things are and then also make sure it’s in alignment with the talent market and the compensation rates that we’re willing to pay, right?
Susan:
There are a couple of other factors like a can do attitude. I know you know the term personal accountability but the company that I represent they measure personal accountability in these assessments and the median or the mid point for personal accountability is so low that you don’t have to be that high in personal accountability to be a star because most people [crosstalk 00:29:50] …
Fletcher:
It could be better than everybody else.
Susan:
Yeah, yeah. And someone’s who high in personal accountability will do a work around. If they can’t do it this way they’ll figure out a way to get it done and that’s what you really want. You want people who are really high in personal accountability.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So personal accountability then becomes the driver of problem solving, right? That’s the work around piece. We say we want people who are reliable and great problem solvers, really we might want to be saying we want people who are high in personal responsibility because that encompasses both of those things.
Susan:
Yes, indeed, indeed.
Fletcher:
I like that one. I mean that one goes a long way there. So to recap, what are two or three things that we can being doing tomorrow to better understand the perspective of A players?
Susan:
Well one is to put yourself in the shoes of the person who would be coming into your company. And if it’s a millennial, at this they really wanna know that you have, you either have or getting the most up-to-date technology so that might have not have been that important to somebody else but that’s a big deal for millennials.
Fletcher:
Okay.
Susan:
Go ahead.
Fletcher:
So you either have it or at least let them know that there’s a roadmap to developing it that they can be a part of.
Susan:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Fletcher:
Okay.
Susan:
It’s very important to be clear about your culture so that when the person is talking to you, they may not even know the term culture but they would know when they walked in the door and instead of an onboarding process they were just sent to a chair and given a manual. One of the facts that I got the other day was that in the first 14 to 21 days a new hire is being asked by others and is asking themselves did I make a mistake and if they came up with the answer yes I made a mistake they start looking for a job right away so you wanna make sure there’s smooth transition. When they come in the door they’re getting supported by other people who are glad you’re here and what do you need, that would be really important. I mean you don’t have to change the whole culture for that, you just have to be aware that a new hire [crosstalk 00:32:17] …
Fletcher:
No you have to be clear about what it is, right? That’s the point right? Because whatever it is, it is what it is so if they haven’t had that exposure to it and yeah Roody Mick was on our last episode and talked a lot about that so if anybody missed it go back and listen to that one, that’s a bog one. So what would be the last thing that [crosstalk 00:32:39] …
Susan:
I think another one would be to be very clear that you can define success so that you can tell the person before you hire them and then once they take the job what success looks like and then give them feedback once they come on board and let them know that we have an ongoing system of feedback so that we can let you know how you’re doing versus … First of all, sharing the vision. What is the vision? Do we as a company care about our product, our people and our processes. No let’s see. It’s definitely your product, your customers and your employees.
Fletcher:
And the people yeah.
Susan:
Somehow letting people know that you care about those but then this is what our vision is for the company and this is how we define success.
Fletcher:
Yeah. So that’s really good. So put yourself in your A player’s shoes, your A player employee or candidates shoes. Be clear with them about your company culture, help them understand what that means to them so they know up front before hiring them and then define what success looks like clearly both of the individual in their as well as for the organization and how all that relates back to them as a person and to your company culture. So yeah I think that’s a really holistic great way to look at how all this fits together both from the candidates perspective and the employers perspective. So yeah that’s awesome. Well Susan it’s been really, really nice speaking with you. I really appreciate your perspective on hiring and putting yourself in the other person’s shoes is amazing, I think it’s something we all gotta work on. I know I always gotta get better at that one. So before we sign off I’d love to make sure everybody knows who you are again and how they can get in touch with you in case they’d like to learn more.
Susan:
Okay, great. My name is Susan Bellows, B-E-L-L-O-W-S. My website is susanbellows.com. I offer a 30 minute free consultation so we can figure out if it’s a good fit. And I also wanna encourage people to go to the website called greatplacetowrk.com and it has everything from how you can get certified as a great place to work, resources, events, and you can start to see the companies aren’t that big who got certified in this but it shows … if you’re trying to become a place where people wanna work … And I was attending something in Florida in October and there were a lot of recruiters there and they were all complaining, I mean they were internal recruiters, all complaining they needed to convince management to figure out a way to make it a great place to work so that people would want to even interview there.
Fletcher:
Yeah.
Susan:
If you go to great place to work you’ll the kinds of things that are being ranked by employees. Here’s an example, my, this is just a credit union or something, company overview, 91% of the employees said my work has special meaning, this is not “just a job”. 92% of our customers would rate the service we deliver as excellent. 91% say I’m proud to tell others I work here. These are the kids of things that are really important to people when they’re going … particularly if you’re poaching because that’s the big thing now is poaching, why am I gonna leave company X to got to Y if you can’t offer this experience for me.
Fletcher:
Yeah exactly. That would be one of the big motivators aside from money which most likely most companies are pretty equal in terms of their competitiveness and compensation then the only other differentiator is is this a great place to work or is it just an okay place to work? I think that’s probably where most people run into the pitfalls here is I don’t think most places are a bad place to work but I think many are just okay and the A players don’t wanna be doing just okay, right?
Susan:
Nobody does.
Fletcher:
They want greatness. Nobody does, nobody wants just okay, right? Yeah. Exactly. So no, I think that’s really good and yep, I think for anybody who’s struggling to attract talent especially in this market talking to Susan and checking out greatplacewtowork.com can definitely be a very valuable place to … set of resources and place to start and go from there. Susan thank you very much for your time today.
Susan:
Thank you.
Fletcher:
We’ll sign off. `
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