How to master recruiting | Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen | TEDxWarwick

what a fantastic intro thank you so much so for the next 15 minutes i'm going to talk about exactly what we said earlier which is one of the most important things for any leader to be good i'm actually going to discuss. the most important thing for any leader and CEO is to be good at the interesting thing about this particular subject is that no one teaches anything about it actually it is very hard to find books on the subject it is very difficult to find a university course on the subject matter, it is very hard to find a TED talk on the subject, but before I tell you what I'm going to talk about, I'm going to talk about a guy named Benjamin Sander, now Benjamin Sander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, Alec Esther. now the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, if you don't know, is one of the best orchestras in the world, now Ben is one day standing on stage at his podium conducting his orchestra of about a hundred people and he's realizing it right now. over time that out of a hundred people in the orchestra Ben is the only person who has no sound and he's the only person who has no sound that means you can't hear Ben no of course not of course you can hear him you can hear him how he is delivery through other people you can hear it through how he has selected people to be in his orchestra now a lot of people have very advanced ideas of leadership but I think Ben does quite well in that prayer really for us leadership and our very simplistic way boils down to two things: it's about building the right team building the best possible team for your company your organization whatever part of your life and it's about helping those people achieve the results they want. they will make you successful in that particular role that's all now I've been introduced before and very often I'm introduced as an entrepreneur or I'm introduced as a CEO and the reason for that is that I've been a part of and lucky enough to c-found over 20 companies with absolutely amazing people people who are extremely smart and with whom I will achieve success, but I don't really consider myself a CEO I don't consider myself an entrepreneur I consider myself a recruiter that's my job and my role is to find the right people if i find the right people and select the right people my job is really very simple if i don't select the right people my life is very complicated now we all know when we have a great team and we have selected the right people for our team our life looks like this maybe not so much but the fact is that we are not creative in selecting people and there are very, very good reasons for it there are no topics in the university as i mentioned previously on the subject when we become a leader in an organization our boss does not take us aside and say mass to Now I'm going to teach you the secret of how you select the right people for your team just assume that people are going to be great at selecting people for our team so we just say look congratulations teacher you are now the manager of this and this restaurant of this in this part of the company go build a great team thank you so much now when we mess up we know the cost US Department of Labor said the cost of any particular bad hire to any role is 30% McKenzie went a step further and said the difference between average performance, top performer in a role, 67% productivity, and bottom line earnings, but it's not just these numbers that are impactful we know what else had impacts impacts culture when you hire the wrong person we recruit the wrong person for a team culture goes down the drain you know what impacts too impacts your happiness and i hired the wrong person you go to work stressed every day because you have to deal with a person you don't want to deal with that also makes their life miserable if you select the wrong person for a job you are not only doing yourself this favor to yourself. doing them in this favor also limits your growth limits a lot of different things for you there is an old saying that people spend ten percent of their time

recruiting

90% of their time they make enough for whatever

recruiting

mistakes they make. laugh here is probably a leader who has also dealt with this and goes back to the being part if you hire the right people your job is actually very easy now.

I gotta tell you we're horrible we're getting better but if you're horrible it's because no one taught me how to recruit so I had to go out and find out for myself one of my CEOs who had just been tapped to one of our companies as CEO , you know, I found out that I had practically failed training him in recruiting and I went up to him and said look, you come to me about marketing, you come to ask me about finances, you come to ask me about sales, but you've never asked me a question about recruitment. why is that exactly what i was met with complete silence and a very red face the face of someone very embarrassed so we have to be proactive in finding this information so that we can improve our efforts now the good thing is that we are not Alone to be horrible at recruiting British billionaire John Caldwell once said if I'm lucky I only hire wrong 70% of the time now knowing we're bad at this we set out as a team we wanted to build a framework that would allow us to be a lot more better recruiting I think we have a little problem here we go thank you we set out to build a framework that would make us much better at recruiting a structured process that we think may be one of the best structured processes and recruiting frameworks in the world right now I should say before of doing this that we are very bad at recruiting if you look at the talents that I have in some of the tests that we use, the The ability to understand people is the lowest of all my talents, so dry doesn't really come naturally to me.

The last thing I have to tell you is that we probably understand 20% of what we need to understand, we probably tap into only 10%. of that due to things like arrogance due to our cognitive biases because we still think we can do things with our spine and it only computes whether the person is right for the role like this now all these cognitive biases there are a lot of them but let me guide you through some of them, so the first thing is to try to hire ourselves, why aren't we excellent? You're the best employee there is and we know what it looks like I'm analytical he has to she has to be analytical I'm empathic the person has to be empathic I'm competitive everyone should be competitive so we look for ourselves the second problem is we try to hire people they can do everything I talked to one of our CEOs the other day and he was trying to hire a CMO he wanted to see oh he came from a PR firm true story when a CMO comes from a PR firm that is analytical detail not good at Sales good at strategic relationship building It's easy to find the right person so we try to find one person who can do every part of the whole company because then we feel like we're going to succeed but the truth is that selecting the right people is a bit like a football team, you don't want one person who is good at everything, what If you want the best attacker, you want the best goalkeeper and you want the best defender, we also like to hire people who are worse than us. says ace hire bees be taller CC Hyades and so on I try to tell our leaders all the time to say, look I don't care if you're the smartest person in the room because ultimately what will tell me you're Re the smartest person is that you hire people who are smarter and better than you.

Actually, as a CEO or as a leader, you don't need to be the smartest person. You don't even need to know more about the topic and people. work for you as long as you can find a We select the right people. We also make quick decisions. We go into an interview and we know how it works. We get into an interview in about a couple of minutes, maybe sometimes seconds. We have decided that I like the boy. I don't like the boy. and then 45 50 and our minutes we end up spending all our time and all our energy just to confirm that we're right we know it's a bit of the mistake of Facebook nowadays where we love to look for stories that confirm the bias we already have and we Last of many is Whedon not signing and oh sorry we're signing for individual positions not teams we're trying to build a team we don't need 15 forwards we don't need 15 gold goalkeepers us. we need to get people together in a team because we know that we have these biases and because we know that we make these mistakes all the time we wanted to make it a lot more structured we wanted to do something that's almost like an ono thing to say is we built an algorithm to predict if a person is going to be right for the role, yes or no, that is, we build a mathematical formula and an algorithm that runs on a computer that is going to predict whether you apply for a job with us, whether you will be successful, yes or no, now before you think darren is think well how he is an idiot while you know how he can treat people this way how you can put people into algorithms i mean what we are doing is really what we are doing up here already which is we are trying to figure out whether or not this person is right for this particular role that is really what happens when we sit across from someone and interview them and they e ask questions we look at what we're trying to gauge if this person is going to be successful in this job actually if you want one to be hidden really what we're trying to figure out is we're trying to figure out if this person will be able to create the result that we want the person to believe so we build an algorithm which is basically we build a scorecard of all the different things that are important and we build an algorithm and then it calculates a percentage probability that that person will succeed in that role in particular now the algorithm isn't perfect but it's just a support tool right now but the algorithm forces us to do is it forces us to be aware of what's going on up here it forces us to think about the decisions we're making the tradeoffs what we are doing and by putting on a piece of paper that we have already significantly altered, the way we do things now all the things that are Today's algorithm I'll let people through so there's still a lot of bias and a lot of things that we do wrong because all the input comes from us, whether it's from us directly to your tools that we use comes from people ultimately. instance, so it's just a score calculation that you do today one of the reasons why we like this approach is because in addition to selecting the right people we have another thing that we are passionate about and that is giving each candidate to each person a fair shot at a job that you see in high school it was horrible it was absolutely horrible i went to the principal's office multiple times the fact that i even finished high school i still don't understand i was fired from McDonald's and that takes a lot i agree that I don't buy my reason my cat fell out the window as a reason for not showing up for work one day, which turns out to be true, but there are probably others reasons for dismissal. me too, but the truth is that some of us mature later for our careers, some of us need the right position, the right motivation, the right leadership to be excellent, now the problem is that today everyone is evaluated on their resume if you don't have the right mess in may you're out now it limits the world it limits the candidates we can find and attract that means we can't find the diamond in the rough and we love finding diamonds in the rough that's why we're entrepreneurial that's why we do that build companies by having tools available to us that allow us to look beyond resumes beyond the obvious we can find what we call whispering talent now let me explain what a whisper is by saying this first of all you have the screaming talent a screaming talent for give you an example, someone who went to war college got low grades went to a big investment bank in town got promoted faster than anyone that's screaming talent now anyone can spot a screaming talent because just look at their resume you know what they look like we like to find whispering talent whispering talent is as good as they come screaming talent other people just don't know it's not that easy to see having an algorithm and tools allows us to open up our pipeline to everyone there allows anyone with any resume off the streets with college without a college degree to come and join to our company we can now pretend that we have certain barriers outside of but in reality we look at each candidate who presents very thoroughly toThrough the tools that we have available to us now, when you're looking to hire someone, you're trying to determine three different questions, ultimately you're trying to figure out if they can deliver the result, but that really falls into three different groups your willingness for the person to be able to do the job they will succeed if they deliver the result you want them to deliver number one is very important the second thing is to fit your culture they will be able to fit into the culture you have created which is key for us which is binary if you don't fit in our culture no matter how good you are you are not going to be a part of our work company but if you fit our culture then you are capable and can achieve the result then it is up to you if we fit into your life and it is important that you fit in the life of the candidates as well.

Will you be a part? their lives for a long time or a short time do you fit into your family situation what they want and what they want for your career now if you want to go through an interview process very structurally we find there are three things you have to be on Well. The first is that you have to be able to identify the right needs, that is, you have to figure out what you have to be good at in this particular role to be successful. You need to get better at identifying the right needs for the particular role and be careful, as I said before, that you don't try to say that the person must be good at everything.

The second is that you want to have the right questions and the right tools to be able to figure out the right things. data for those needs is the person able to answer how you answer the questions does the person fit those particular needs you have for the position now a need could be that you want someone who is good at relationship building for example then the question becomes what questions, what tools can I use to find out, by the way, it could be cases and other things, and then you want to have the correct interpretation of the information, someone comes to the door and sells you, sells you, look.

Here's the candidate, the sweetie who got straight A's at work but never had a hand in organizing a TED talk, sort of, that person is dry but that person has no drive? It is a question of interpretation and the correct interpretation becomes very important and often. where people are going wrong now, the way we can solve this in particular, identify the needs is we want to think of it like asking a Formula One team about their car, now imagine you ask Formula One about the car, they would say look at a car this consists of chassis wheels suspension inside the wheels they are different subcategories of thieves that you can have and you would tell them how you choose your thief well it depends on the condition he is in on the road it depends on how he wants driving and how your car is set up during the interview is similar when looking for someone in canada said look i want these candidates who have empathy need to understand the tradeoffs you are doing what are the good things about having empathy?

We also like people, but the problem can also be that sometimes it's hard to make decisions because you understand why people have a hard time and you understand their situation. we have to understand the tradeoff between those different things now for us we found that we believe that in talking to executive search firms we talk to human analysis firms we talk to psychologists that a person at a very high level consists of three different things consisting of a brain, which is an IQ, which is your ability to learn and understand information, take advantage of that information, the second thing you consist of in a work situation is your heart, which is your reality person and your talents and the third thing is your toolbox, what is past experiences, this is what you usually see, a resume, that is your education, the things you have learned, the functional learning exam, now, most companies and most people recruiting start with functional learning start about what the person has done before we start with the heart before we have identified what we want As long as the person has studied this or has studied that or has this background we say who we are looking for as a person because we are big believers in Fitzalan's superior training for a qualified methodology, which is that we hire the best person and help them get the tools because we think they can find the right person tools to be successful at this the second thing we look at is if they have the IQ to comprehend and understand and take advantage of the information and then the third thing is we look at our resume that's true for probably 95% of the position we are looking for, of course, if you want There is no one to build this roof, they better have the right skills.

It's not enough to have enough motivation and then we try to find ways to prove that. interview questions, you can give them cases, you can ask them to do presentations, you can use the assessment tools that are out there, but really what you're trying to find out is if the person can do the job, so the best thing to do is really take the person and ask them to work on the particular job for a couple of days and you'll be surprised that I found CTO, CEO, CFO and CEO come to our office and really do a job for everything for between two a day a day. a week no no matter how senior you are that's the best way for them to get familiar with the company and the best way for you to get familiar with the company so figure out how you're going to test the things that are important to you and then the last thing you have to do is go back and look at the data, so when you hire someone, save their notes, write down their notes, save them, and then look at them three to six months later and say if they were right or wrong. i was wrong, most people just say i hired wrong, ok, let me try again. very few people go and say what did i misread did i ask the wrong questions did i use the wrong tools to get that information? if you do all those things right and apply your own Drakkar to this and you don't have to build an old man you can do it your way then you will get better and better at improving your ability to select the right people and ultimately you can getting to the part where you'll spend 10% of your time recruiting 90% of your time building startups or whatever you love to do, thank you very much.