Human Resources

A friend of mine was applying for an IT position posted on a staffing/recruiting company website. The position was for Director of IT for a Dallas energy company and it seemed like a good fit for her.

She went to the staffing agency website, entered in the basic info and uploaded her resume. She was then sent to a secondary page for more details (Contact info, etc). After filling out the contact information, she was directed to a page that had specific questions related to the job.

Imagine her surprise when she starts answering the questions and gets to #4…there’s no question (See image below).  Question #5 has no question either…yet both ‘questions’ are required before you can proceed.

(Click Image for larger view)

She took a second to think about the type of company that would would require someone to fill out an answer for a non-existent question. She surmised that it was a simple mistake…we all make mistakes right? She decided to go ahead and submit the answers and she wrote “this question doesn’t exist” on #4 and #5…and took a screen shot just to be on the safe side.

She’s glad she did. She received an email a few days later stating “Because you didn’t answer all of the questions, your resume isn’t being considered for this position”. She responded with #4 and #5 being blank and sent them the screenshot, which they flatly refused to accept.

Needless to say…she wasn’t’ real heartbroken by not getting an interview. She passed along this story (and screenshot) to me and I immediately asked to use it on my blog (which she agreed to of course).

Moral of this story? If you use technology to screen candidates, at least make sure it works.

Mike Schaffner posted an interesting article titled “Hiring the Right / Wrong IT People to Achieve Alignment” in which he pointed at a recent article by Dr. George E. Strouse titled “Are You Hiring the Wrong IT Staff to Achieve Your Alignment Goals?” that appeared on CIO.com. Check both articles out.

An excerpt from Dr. Strouse’s article sum’s the topic up nicely:

The real problem underlying the IT business alignment conundrum is that we’re not hiring the right people in IT. The right people need strong backgrounds in both business and technology. Most IT hiring managers place too much emphasis on strong technology backgrounds.

As regular readers may know, I’ve written about this topic a few times (see here, here and here for a few samples).

I’ve spent a good portion of my career working with organization’s trying to align their business strategy with their technology. I’ve found is that the difference between success and failure in this activity is found within the people that the organization has hired.

The majority of these organizations who were successful had employees within the IT organization that could ’speak’ to the business side of the company. The IT group wasn’t strictly technologists…they were technologists with business backgrounds. Those organizations that struggled with aligning their technology with their business goals were the ones that placed an emphasis on technology knowledge over business knowledge.

Mike Schaffner relates an interesting antecdote on this topic:

I once had a CEO tell me that one of the things she wanted in IT was people that “talk like us” meaning they understand business issues and can explain things in business terms rather than just business terms.

I’ve had similar conversations with CxO’s as well. They are tired of hearing acronyms and technology buzzwords…many just want to understand how technology can help the business achieve it’s goals.

Interesting things to think about…as are the Related Articles below. Enjoy!

Heard a wonderful story last week from a developer friend of mine and thought I’d share (with commentary of course!).

He had taken a full-time job at an organization as a Senior .NET developer and was working an average of 55 hours a week for them. He liked the work he was doing but wasn’t too keen on the ‘punch-in/punch-out’ timeclock that they used to track all employees. Nonetheless, he was happy…it was interesting work and good pay.

At the end of his third week there, he decided to head out early one Friday afternoon and get an early start on the weekend. He ‘clocked out’ 1/2 hour early and enjoyed his weekend.

Monday morning comes along and what does he find in his email? A message from his boss stating that he would need to stay an extra 1/2 hour to make up for the previous week. He went to see his boss figuring it might be an automated message from HR but was told that he was expected to work a minimum eight hour day and would need to make up the time.

His response to his boss? A respectful question about the additional 14.5 hours he had worked the previous week and why those hours didn’t make up for early departure the previous week. ‘

The response from his boss is classic ignorance: “we pay you for 8 hours a day…we expect a full 8 hour day from you“. It also shows his ignorance in math…..since when did 0.5 become greater than 14.5 (the number of hours he worked in addition to the 40 hours)?

Needless to say, my friend resigned and is now working as a contractor being paid hourly for the work that he does.

His boss, and the company that he had worked for, were a classic example of the ‘old school’ business management mindset: You must be in your chair for 8 hours a day to do your job. This is so wrong…especially with the research studies that are coming out left and right (see this post and this one).

Management Issues recently published an article titled “Flexible working boosts the bottom line” that reports on some very interesting research results that says:

…a new study has found that greater flexibility reduces absenteeism, improves employee health and even helps to improve employee commitment.

The research report, released by Wake Forest University, provides some very interesting results. Look for my analysis toward the end of this post.

The study, as explained in the MI article is:

…a health survey completed by 3,193 employees of a large multinational pharmaceutical company, shows that flexible working is associated with definitive improvements in absenteeism rates, job commitment and employee health.

Some interesting results from the research:

• An increase in flexibility of working hours was associated with a decrease in absence and and an increase in job performance
• Part-time and flextime options create a culture of flexibility, especially when managers and supervisors encourage a proper ‘work-life‘ balance.

The research is summed up thusly:

“This study provides evidence that flexibility is associated with health or well-being over time,” said Joseph G. Grzywacz, Ph.D., senior author and an associate professor of family medicine.

“For managers, the results suggest that implementing flexible work arrangements can contribute to the bottom-line.”

Analysis:

I’m a big believer in flexible work arrangements…everyone that I know who works from home or has some other type of flex time arrangement is much more happy with their job. They feel as though their employer understands that there is things in life other than work…and…many of these people work much more than the ‘required’ 40 hours a week because they feel much more excited and interested in their job.

Contrast that with the folks that slog through a job that still holds to the 8 to 5 mentality and, for the most part, you’ll see less happy folks.

If you don’t know The Daily WTF, you should…most of the content is programmer related (and usually goes over my head) but some of the content is quite interesting.

Take for example, the two blog posts below…they deal with Interviewing candidates. If you are a regular reader of my blog you’ll know I’ve blogged about Interviewing (here and here for example) and that I think that an organization should try their darnedest to hire the best people that they can.

The two posts below are meant to be funny but they also provide a bit of insight into the world of interviewing.

Design me a House (by David J)

In “Design me a House“, the author describes an interview that he knew fairly early on in the interview process that he wasn’t a good fit for but couldn’t quite get the interviewer to stop the interview. The interviewer jumped into a ‘Job Interview 2.0′ interview style and asked the following question:

“Design me a house,” the interviewer cheerfully demanded.

“Ugh,” I groaned, “what do you want your house to look like?”

“But aren’t you going to ask how many floors it should have,” he glibly responded.

“Fine. How many floors do you want?”

“Two!,” he shouted, “no, three! I mean, one! Err… no, I want six, maybe sev–”

The interviewee played along until he could take it no more and said:

“Look,” I interrupted, “I don’t mean to be rude, but you haven’t asked a single question about programming.”

The interviewer scoffed, “you’ve got a lot to learn about developing good software if you don’t see the relevance here.”

Thankfully, the interview ended shortly thereafter. And while they never did extend me an offer, they did end up going out of business later that year. Apparently, they had issues delivering software to their clients.

Job Interview 2.0: Now With Riddles!

In this blog post, the author approaches the ‘new’ ideas of job interview questions that have nothing to do with the job but try to pull out some ideas about the creativity, critical thinking abilities and other skills of the candidate. However, some of these questions can be very confusing and downright asinine.Take the example below that a reader of The Daily WTF sent in:

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike stationary, maybe with a fan blowing in the person’s face. He probably wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

The author goes on to say the following:

Now, granted, he will not get the job. Despite the complete absurdity of the design request, and the complete practicality of his answer, the job will go to a candidate who manages to answer the question by designing an extremely overcomplicated solution for a completely non-existent problem. And that candidate will be the same person who designs their software.

Analysis

Consider these questions (also from Job Interview 2.0: Now With Riddles!)

1. How would you determine the weight of a Boeing 747?
2. Given an opaque box with three light bulbs inside and three switches outside, how would you determine which switch corresponded to which bulb if the box could be opened only once and only after all the switches were permanently set?
3. You are at a ravine with three others and need to cross a rickety bridge. You can cross it in one minute, the three others can cross it in two, five, and ten, respectively. A flashlight (your group has only one) is always required to cross, and only two people can cross at a time. How do you cross as quickly as possible?

Do questions like this really help you to determine who the person is and what they are capable of? Sure they may might help determine the creativity and critical thinking capabilities but these days I’d gamble that most of these questions are out on the net somewhere (e.g., google “how would you determine the weight of a boeing 747“) so you may have lost that ability as well.

Do you really want to ask your candidates silly questions like this or would you rather get to know the candidate on a more personal level? How about taking the candidate out for a coffee and spending some quality time interacting and getting to know them? That’s my approach at least.

When I’ve been asked these questions in the past my ‘BS’ alert starts to go off in my head and I start looking for the exit. Next time I’ll have to submit the interview The Daily WTF

In early March, Mind Hacks had an interesting article titled “Are you experienced? Does it matter?” which adds another wrinkle to my the argument I made in my Experience vs Ability post.

The article, which cites a Time magazine article titled “The Science of Experience“, states that, according to research reported in the Time article:

research has failed to show that experience, on its own, predicts task performance. In other words, old hands often do no better than novices (Reference).

The Time article reports on a study conducted at Florida State University over the last 30 years. This study claims that:

three decades of research into expert performance has shown that experience itself — the raw amount of time you spend pursuing any particular activity, from brain surgery to skiing — can actually hinder your ability to deliver reproducibly superior performance (Reference).

The article quotes Anders Ericsson, author of Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2006) as pointing out the following:

rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance (Reference)

The basic point of the article and the Mind Hacks post was the following: Experience doesn’t guarantee a higher performing employee….it might…but it might not. The performance will come down to how passionate, how committed, and how interested the employee is in constantly pushing themselves. The question now is: how do you quantify these traits when looking to hire?

I still say that innate ability + passion + an interest in constantly learning will bring an extremely high performing employee, and therefore a high performing organization.

Technorati Tags: ability, experience, Florida State University, Mind Hacks, Research, Time

Jeff Attwood over at Coding Horror wrote a great article titled “The Years of Experience Myth” that everyone should add to their ‘must read’ list.

The article discusses the use of phone screens to in the hiring process (and points to a couple of great articles on the topic) but the point of the article pertains to the trap of trying to be overly specific in your hiring.

Jeff writes about the myth of ‘years of experience’ and how many organizations fall into the trap of trying to hire the perfect person. You know the job descriptions that require “7 years experience in J2EE in a manufacaturing environment”. An excerpt from the article is:

This toxic, counterproductive years of experience myth has permeated the software industry for as long as I can remember. Imagine how many brilliant software engineers companies are missing out on because they are completely obsessed with finding people who match– exactly and to the letter– some highly specific laundry list of skills.

Somehow, they’ve forgetten that what software developers do best is learn. Employers should be loooking for passionate, driven, flexible self-educators who have a proven ability to code in whatever language — and serving them up interesting projects they can engage with.

Emphasis mine.

Jeff’s article discusses software engineers specifically but this same issue can be found in any technical area and many other areas. I’ve talked with recruiters and organizations are filter out way too many excellent candidates. For example, the “7 years in J2EE in Manufacturing environment” sample I gave earlier is one that I saw while searching indeed.com (great site btw) for this post. What does someone with 7 years in experience know that someone with 6 years experience doesn’t? Does it really matter that the J2EE experience come from the manufacturing environment?

I’m of the mindset that you hire the best person you can regardless of the number of years of experience that they have. I’m not convinced that someone with 20 years experience is a better hire than someone with 2 years. I’d rather hire the person that will get the job done. As Jeff writes:

Employers should be looking for passionate, driven, flexible self-educators who have a proven ability

Absolutely.

Next time you go to hire someone…look at what they can do and what they have the potential to do; not what they may have done in the past.

Technorati Tags: Hiring, Experience vs ability, Coding Horror, Human Resources, Management

“Employee Engagement” is one of those ‘buzzwords’ that you hear thrown about quite a bit…but this is a buzzword that should be carefully thought about by every organization.

A recent survey, reported on by Management Issues, has some very interesting results pertaining to Employee Engagement. The article, titled “Getting to the Heart of the Disengagement Gap“, reports the following results:

A poll of 14,000 employees across 10 European countries by consultants Watson Wyatt has confirmed what a number of similar large-scale surveys have been suggesting over the past few years - namely that there is a vast reserve of untapped potential in the workplace in the form uncommitted or actively disgruntled staff.

It also revealed that more than four out of 10 are actively considering leaving their current employer.

But whereas a 2007 poll of almost 90,000 workers by workplace consultancy Towers Perrin found that just a fifth felt engaged with their work, Watson Wyatt found that only 13 per cent (fewer than one in seven) displayed both strong commitment as well as having a good understanding of the part they could play in making their organizations successful - an understanding Watson Wyatt term “line of sight”.

Only 13 percent of the workforce is fully engaged and trying to create value of organziations. What are the other 87% of the workforce up to? Are they lazy? Incompetent? I highly doubt it…its more likely that the organization has done a poor job of describing how each person’s contributions can affect the organization.

The lack of Employee engagement isn’t just the fault of an organization. There are people who are OK with doing ‘just enough’ to get by but an organization should do everything in its power to ensure that employees are happy and that they understand how valuable they are to the organization.

Whether you agree with the Towers Perrin study that found 20% engagement or Watson Wyatt’s 13% engagement, I think you’d have to agree that there is a problem. How many coworkers/employees do you know that are actively seeking employment elsewhere? How many are really doing the best job that they can do?

How can an organization engage employees? There’s no simple answer…it takes long-term effort by both the organization and the employee(s). I’m not an expert in this field (or any field!) but I will provide a few basic thoughts on how to get started engaging more employees.

• Hire right
• Don’t ask for (or expect) an employee to ‘live to work’ for you…respect their life outside of the office.
• Hold all employees accountable. If an employee notices that there are ’sacred cows’ that aren’t accountable for their actions, their level of effort and engagement will drop.
• Offer flexibility for work hours
• Offer job rotation opportunities - this would hold especially true to young/new employees….keep people interested and don’t let them get bored with their job.

Those are just a few thoughts…i’m sure there are many more. For a great follow-up article on the subject, read Wayne Turmel’s latest article titled “Employee Enagement has a ring to it” that discusses this topic…great article and worth reading.

Technorati Tags: Employee Engagement, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

This is an excerpt of a paper I’ve just completed titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage”. I’ve provided a brief intro plus the conclusion here. This white paper was the inspiration for the the topics discussed in my previous posts titled “Resource Diversity & Immobility Simplified“, “Competitive Advantage and the Resource Based View of the Firm“, and “Competitive Advantage - The Human Capital approach”

To read the entire article, download the PDF titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage“.

This paper provides a brief review of the literature within the space of information technology and business alignment, and more specifically, the areas of creating competitive advantage by managing human capital to create a sustainable advantage in the marketplace.

In today’s ever-changing world, organizations must learn to evolve, adapt and continuously rethink their strategic objectives and operational abilities. As part of this strategic planning process, organizations have historically looked at two aspects; strategy (how they will go to market, what they will sell, etc) and execution (how to implement the strategy, how to do business, etc). The seminal research on strategy and competitive advantage (Andrews, 1986; Porter, 1998a, 1998b) historically overlooked two of the most important aspects of any strategy; technology and people.

In the 1990’s, researchers and practitioners began looking at merging technology into the strategic planning process and how the alignment of business strategy with information technology can help to create a competitive advantage (Henderson & Venkatraman, 1993). These researchers had brought technology into the strategic planning process, and in some respects they considered the human resources of the organization, but they still overlooked the people as being a valuable piece of capital that could be used to create competitive advantage.

This oversight is most visible within the information technology (IT) groups. Even though many organizations and researches stressed the need for IT and business alignment, they still seemed to overlook the human capital aspect while aligning IT and business strategy.

These oversights have led to the current environment of overworked, disengaged and misaligned IT personnel and IT groups. The “turnover culture” that has arisen within the IT industry provides some evidence of the unhappiness and/or discontent that most IT personnel have (Moore & Burke, 2002).

Recent research has provided a path to the solution of the problem of creating sustainable alignment between IT and business strategy. These solutions involve not only aligning IT and strategy but also implementing human capital management practices to ensure that people are considered as much of a resource for creating competitive advantage as any other asset within the organization (Hu & Huang, 2006; Robert, Agarwal, & Ferratt, 2000).

This paper provides a review of existing literature related to the strategic alignment of business and information technology and human capital management practices. The first section, titled “Alignment of IT with Business Strategy” provides a review of existing business and IT alignment research. The second section, titled “Human Capital Management, IT & Business Alignment” provides an overview of existing research into human capital management practices within the IT space.

The third section, titled “Human Capital as Competitive Advantage” outlines the use human capital as a means to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace. Lastly, the fourth and final section titled “Future Research and Conclusions,” outlines areas that may provide avenues of further research and concludes the paper.

To read the entire paper, download the PDF titled “Information Technology Human Capital as Competitive Advantage“.

Further Research and Conclusion

Further research into this area can follow Ferratt et al.’s (2005) study of the effects of human resource management on information technology (IT) employee turnover (Ferratt et al., 2005) and Joseph et al.’s (2007) suggestion that adopting a human capital management approach to managing IS employees may increase employee engagement and reduce turnover and job dissatisfaction (Joseph et al., 2007).

Another area of further research that could be considered is Huang and Hu’s (2007) approach of combining human capital management along with a business-IT alignment model by using a balanced scorecard system to implement and measure alignment. This balanced scorecard approach seems reasonable but very little quantitative data exists to measure the success or failure of this approach (Huang & Hu, 2007). Further research into the use of balanced scorecards to align IT, business and human capital management practices could be accomplished by collecting quantitative data in multiple organizations to provide more insight into the success and/or failure of this approach.

Yet another avenue for further research is within the area of validation of alignment of IT system requirements with business strategy (Bleistein, Cox, & Verner, 2005). Bleisten et al.’s research provides a framework for measuring and ensuring that all IT system requirements are in alignment with business goals. This research is interesting but as yet unproven.

Lastly, research into furthering the application of the resource based view of firms and the creation of resource diversity and resource immobility within organizations seems to be a fairly wide open area. In many organizations today, outsourcing work has become the norm as has hiring contractors instead of full-time employees. Many research questions arise from this. A few examples are:

• How can an organization create resource diversity and/or resource immobility when they are drawing from the same talent pool of outsourcers and independent contractors as their competitors? This is an idea that is very interesting and something worth pursuing.
• How can an organization segregate IT projects so that non-strategic projects (is there such as thing?) are managed with non-strategic assets and resources while strategic IT projects are managed with strategic assets and resources.

There is still considerable research to be done to better understand how to create sustainable advantage using technology and people. The areas of information systems, strategic human resource management and organizational behavior can provide models to help create sustainable advantage and value for organizations.

In order to truly create sustainable competitive advantage, an organization must have the right strategy, technology and people in place. In today’s world, it isn’t enough to have only one or two of these; an organization must obtain and maintain the mix of the right strategy, the right technology and the right people.

HR World has a new article titled “30 Interview Questions You Can’t Ask and 30 Sneaky, Legal Alternatives to Get the Same Info“.

At first, the title seemed to turn me off to the advice, but after reading through it, I’m OK with it but would have preferred a different title without the word “sneaky”.

There is some good advice for interviewers in the article. For example, one of the illegal questions and its legal alternative is:

What you can’t ask: Are you a U.S. citizen?

Although this seems like the simplest and most direct way to find out if an interviewee is legally able to work for your company, it’s hands-off. Rather than inquiring about citizenship, question whether or not the candidate is authorized for work.

What to ask instead: Are you authorized to work in the U.S.?

Another interesting example:

What you can’t ask: Have you had any recent or past illnesses or operations?

Again, gauging commitment is important, but illness isn’t something that most people can help.The answer here is to make sure that the candidate can perform the job while avoiding questions about his or her physical abilities.

What to ask instead: Are you able to perform the essential functions of this job with or without reasonable accommodations?

The article does a good job presenting illegal questions and alternative questions that an interviewer can use to gather as much information as possible.

Perhaps an unintended accomplishment of the article is to educate people that are interviewing as to what some key phrases in job descriptions and interviews might be and what they might mean. For example:

What you can’t ask: Do you have or plan to have children?

Clearly, the concern here is that family obligations will get in the way of work hours. Instead of asking about or making assumptions on family situations, get to the root of the issue by asking directly about the candidate’s availability.

What to ask instead: Are you available to work overtime on occasion? Can you travel?

This is an interesting question. Instead of directly asking if you have children, the interviewer might ask availability questions…knowing that these types of questions might be alternatives to the question such as ‘do you have children’ or a similar question might help the interviewee better understand the job.

Its an interesting article and definitely worth reading.

Technorati Tags: HR, people, Leadership, organization, Human Resources