Why is it that someone can be at the absolute top of their field, seeing promotion after promotion at one company. Then they leave for a competitor, and don’t last a year in their new role?
They had the numbers, credentials, project type, that should’ve made this a game changing hire. Yet within a few months everyone is scratching their head wondering.
Why could a hire of this caliber not be performing to base level expectations?
It’s a problem we see time and time again, an over reliance on the easily quantifiable aspects of a candidacy that gets them to be considered an A-player, while glossing over the hard to quantify aspects that are equally important to determining if this is the type of role/company the candidate would thrive in.
The man with the calculator
Charlie Munger refers to this as the “fatal unconnectedness of disciplines leading to a man with a hammer syndrome often causing overweighing what can be counted.”
The saying he popularized goes like this…
“To a man with only a hammer, every problem pretty much looks like a nail.”
In recruitment that would look something like….
To a hiring team with a stack of resumes, every candidate’s fit pretty much looks calculable.
In Poor Charlie’s Almanack one of the recurring themes is that Charlie Munger credits much of his success to his multidisciplinary approach to making decisions. A latticework of mental models that he goes through checklist style to make decisions that were worth hundreds of millions and billions of dollars. Here I’ll make the case that this approach to decision making can and should be applied to recruitment.
In his transcribed speeches about the failings of economics, he calls it out for having physics envy, a love for equations, because they’re neat and orderly. Which is a pitfall since human nature isn’t neat and orderly, and much of our economy is driven by human nature.
So the man with the hammer is more like… the man with the calculator, every problem looks like math.
And this physics envy can be seen throughout the world.
“physics envy” has not only bled into economics, but also recruiting & hiring. This over reliance on the numbers on their resume being the key guidance for what makes a candidate worth speaking to.
And much like in economics, hiring managers and recruiters often overweigh what can be easily calculable, overlooking the hard to quantify aspects.
Recruitment is not a hard science, what makes for a great candidate for a specific firm can not be broken down to a repeatable equation. You can lean on hard numbers like pedigree and experience to begin with, and it does help at narrowing your focus.
However, there’s aspects to a great fit/hire that don’t have clean numbers. Like candidates motivations for making a move in the first place (which is a huge driver for whether they’ll love their job and thrive, or hate the job and flounder).
Scored on the wrong skills
First off, most people aren't copywriters, or in sales/marketing. And the better their tenure is, the less experienced at writing resumes/interviewing they will be. To many hiring leaders, those aren’t remotely close to the skills they’re hiring for.
Yet they are often what they get scored against to get a seat at the table in the first place.
Think about it… what is a resume, but a marketing piece. What is a first time meeting the hiring team but a sales call, where you’re selling your candidacy.
I’ve seen midlevel tax managers not get interviews because they had incomplete/unpolished LinkedIn profiles. Like that is something they ever have to worry about when reviewing tax returns…
Sure, maybe this company will someday want this person to market themselves and do Biz Dev at a Director level. But why not see if they’re the type of person who is coachable and has the personality to promote their company, that would likely make for a better qualification criteria.
Again it’s this over reliance on what we can see/measure. It’s this training in using filters entirely based on tenure, keywords, degrees/certs.
Take a candidate who’s only been with their current employer 6 months. What they can’t stick it out any longer? Out of here…
But what if they were at their prior two employers for over 8 years per company. And the only reason they’re hitting the market is because the company was acquired and their scope of duties has been messed up.
Those candidates exist, they get filtered out, and misunderstood if they don't know how to articulate/write that out effectively, or have a recruiter to vouch for them.
Even if you’re not the one leading the search for your next hire, you’d be amazed how often the search gets ran on your behalf with these kinds of missteps.
There’s hope
As funny as Charlie Munger is when he rags on soft sciences like economics, he doesn't do it without offering solutions.
So I won’t just rag on recruitment either….
The answer is simply this. the inverse.
Instead of relying on the easily calculable factors, hiring decisions should take a multidisciplinary approach, using a checklist of tools so that hard-to-quantify aspects of making a great hire are factored.
Suspend your assumptions that any one candidate is going to be amazing or terrible until you’ve gone through a checklist that evaluates the candidate beyond what they included in their resume.
A few areas worth hitting on could be things like:
- Motivations to being in the market
- Behaviour type at work
- Project specificity
- Ability to get things done
If you withhold making a decision until you've gone through a checklist that takes a multidisciplinary approach, of technical, behavioural, and situational. Then you’re worlds ahead of people that hire based on vibes or on whether their experience looks good on paper.
An exercise worth conducting is to sit down and identify the core pieces that matter for responsibilities that a candidate would need to be good at. When this is done it’s quickly seen that some things end up being numerical (hard science). While others are behavioural, (soft science). And some are situational (current reality).
Some of these items in the checklist would be to seek clarification, as in do the numbers they discuss or have on their resume, equate to the same thing you understand it to be.
What the numbers don’t tell you
Take commercial insurance sales reps. The quantifiable numbers are experience, licenses, size of book of business. All important things.
They don't tell the full story either.
It doesn't say how they’ll handle conflict internally when a quote gets messed up, or a client calls in belligerent.
It doesn’t tell you the level of resolve they have to push through down seasons.
It doesn’t tell you if they have the moral fortitude to stay honest, even if it costs them a large deal.
If you hired strictly on book size, you might have someone who puts up numbers, at the cost of creating a toxic culture, driving out other high-performers who don’t want to work with that producer.
Resumes work best for determining relevance and adjacency.
It’s using the resume to sort and say,
“okay, this person plays in the same space as I do, looks to work on comparable projects or could be trained in on our project type.”
That’s it.
Beyond that, you start weighing them based on their ability to write a compelling and effective resume. And unless you're hiring for a copywriter, wgaf?!?
Then take that list and have conversations.
Find out what’s driving this change/interest in a new role, what they hope for the next company they work at to be like. The types of colleagues, leadership, mentorship they aspire to be around.
Bars on Bars
The amount of candidates we’ve been fortunate enough to place over the years that had horrid resumes where we could barely tell if this candidate was even remotely relevant is astounding.
One attorney comes to mind in particular. All we had to work off of was that they had a ton of bars (states they practice law in, not rap skillz). It wasn’t long into our first conversation before it became clear that he was an A-player in every sense of the word when it came to his niche of law.
I have no doubt that he wouldn’t have made it through an ATS or AI screening process. It wouldn’t have done the research to figure out the type of law that the small firm he worked at practiced, or his motivations for a new job, the kind of cases he enjoyed working, or who else he’s considering if he was to make a move.
It’s these equally important and less measurable things that get tossed out the window in an attempt to make recruiting something it’s not, a calculable equation.