Sara Hanks on Embracing Change in the Hiring Space

What, in getting ready for this, one of the things that I mentioned is I'd like that your recent blog was essentially, I'm going to paraphrase it and put it into my context. You're hiring for credentials or experience. And I find that today. to be a very appropriate subject with everything that's going on in the workforce. So what brought you to write that? What triggered that thinking in your head?

All of you had worked together before, knew each other? Nope. Okay, so it's a real, and a moderator.

Okay, so just the three of you. Yep. No advance warning, no prep, no nothing. This is what we're going to talk about.

That was probably the drive behind the panel, right? That she had technology that was usable in this kind of an environment. Yep. Okay, so let me interfere a little bit with the flow. One of the things that I find really lacking today is skills of leaders to do performance reviews. Any thoughts?

One of the things that really bothered me about two months ago now, might be longer, it probably is longer, when the Fed started bumping interest rates. There was a front page Wall Street Journal article about companies going back to serious formal performance reviews to find out who they were going to get rid of. And that's completely contrary to everything that I believe a performance review is about. How can I help you get better? What would you want to do is more what my objective is in a performance review. And it's tied to our job function skill assessment, where we're testing your knowledge and skills tied to your job so that we can identify and talk together about the things that we think. might help you get better in certain aspects.

Right.

This panel, though, seemed to be more concerned about making sure we stayed out of trouble legally.

So trying to build a bridge on this, Sarah, between digitization and performance reviews, is there a connection?

I don't necessarily believe in annual. It's a pretty regular event. It's a communication device as far as I'm concerned, and it's constant. But let me narrow the frame a little bit and think in terms of process improvement, performance reviews. digitization, those three together are a trio. Yeah. They stand together, not as much standing apart. We've dealt with these things as unique events. They need to be done as a continuous, don't they?

Well, and then I start getting into, again, my weird approach to these things is I'd rather, I don't like one-to-one necessarily. I might want to have the team. And we have a performance review as a team, and we're all team members and can see our roles within it. And yes, we deal with those one at a time. But if we can start having the team be the driver, life changes dramatically. Yeah. My daughter's taken on a different teaching aspect, and you might have seen she wrote something about it in our newsletter called AVID, which is, in my view, it's a replacement for GATE, Gifted and Talented Education, which has been a hallmark of America for 40 years, which is, to me, counterproductive. But AVID stands for Advancement via Individual Determination.

And she's teaching it in middle school grades. What's that? Six, seven and eight. Yeah. And every student, every subject, every week has to stand up and give a 10 minute presentation to her class or his classmates about something in that subject that has influenced their life.

Yes. And every, you know, we communicate with schools because of what we do with Learning Without Scars. And almost every school administrator, dean, president, you know, whatever, have been talking about the last 25 years erosion in. Critical thinking skills, analytical skills, communication skills, and more recently, leadership skills. Yeah. This addresses all of them. It's kind of remarkable. And one of my daughter, I put a blog that will be out soon. My daughter has a book that they're using in the school for the teachers called Ruthless Equity.

which is a weird subject. It's intended to be colorless, religionist, sexist, everything neutral. I don't even know who you are. And the illustration is, and this is stupid, but let me give it to you anyways, is a family, father, teenage son, and a tween, standing at a fence watching a baseball game.

The father can see over the fence, the other two can't. So they get boxes out, right? Yep. In the world of equity, each of them gets a box. So the father's way up here and the little one still can't see over. That's not so ruthless equity is two, one, and zero. Yeah. Okay, so freeze frame on that. And here comes my granddaughter. She's finishing off a master's and she's got a semester on communications. Okay. It's based on a book from Randy Olson called The Narrative Gym. Both of these books are wonderful for you to read. They're phenomenal. The Narrative Gym, narrative and gymnasium, deals with three words, and, but, and therefore. And if you take pronouns out of the English language, but is the most commonly used word. And it's the only word that we have that contradicts what we just said.

So now that bring it back into credentials or experience with that foundation, I want experience, not credentials. Where do you fall?

And that confuses the hell out of people.

So let me go down that road a ways and say, I neither want credentials nor experience. I want attitude and a curious mind. And that's it. I'll teach you everything else. Yes. It's a really interesting subject, which is why I wanted to do this. With artificial intelligence, with data analytics, with chat GPT, we can now create a custom character that looks like you, sounds like you. As long as you're not walking around, they haven't figured that part out. If you're sitting at a desk and you can use your hands and your head, et cetera, but they can completely duplicate who you are in 20 different languages. Sure. From a Word document or a PowerPoint slide. So I don't need to have any creative skills at all. I just need to have writing skills. And we're moving to that to replace all of our film clips. From a cost perspective, it's a hell of a lot cheaper.

Yeah. But, you know, it took me back to when I started in the dealership world. I had been teaching athletics. I had run a country club. I took mathematics and physics and they wanted somebody to solve a computer problem. And the vice president of finance was the father of two kids that I taught. So he knew me that way. Yeah. And so they called and said, didn't he take mathematics and physics? I had an interview, a couple of four guys, three or four hours. I was given a job for a year to find and fix a problem. Then the senior partner of the consulting company that sold the software and the hardware for the dealership spent one day a week with me for six months.

You couldn't script that there as far as a learning experience. Sure. You know, but. We found the problem. So we had a year, you know, at the end of that, it's over. It's our choice, your choice. After about six months, seven months, they hired me, and that's 50-something years later. It's ridiculous. But I didn't have the credentials in IT. I didn't have the credentials operationally of the business, parts, service, selling, et cetera, yet they hired me. And somebody taught me everything I needed to know to be able to find and fix the problem. I subscribe to that approach to life. I'll look for people that have diverse backgrounds like you have. Yeah. That have a curious mind that maybe don't have credentials. In my mind, you do, but that's a separate discussion. And many people will hire somebody. who they think can do the job based on the credentials and they fall flat on their nose. And it happens fast. Six,12 months max. Sure.

That's expensive.

So you knew I worked in a prison, right? and with delinquent boys. So it was up to the age of 18. Some of them were murderers, armed robbery, serious stuff, personality disorders, maturity issues. And they trained me how to identify those things. So as a result of that, when I hire somebody or when I interview somebody or when I talk to somebody, I ask different questions. One of my favorite questions is, what are you best at? What do you think you're best at? And it kind of throws people because they don't expect that question. And they have to think a little bit about what they want to share with me. But as soon as they start talking, they go because it becomes comfortable. You know, they're talking about themselves, something they're good at. They give me examples. What do I find out when they tell me what they're good at?

More importantly, what do I find out?

If you take your biggest strength, your strongest attribute asset, and you take it to extreme, it's your biggest weakness.

If I asked you what your biggest weakness is, oh, you're going to dance all over the room because you're not going to tell me that. But if I ask you for your biggest strength, here you go. And then in the interview, they've just gone through that. I said, that's wonderful. Do you have trouble with this? which is the opposite. Yeah. And all of a sudden I can see their faces change.

Well, who is this idiot? You know, what's he, I just went through that, but a month ago with two people and there were three people interviewing at the same time as I was the one person. And my personality is a little bit more forceful than the other. So I was doing a lot of talking and a lot of listening, but provoking. And. I want to find out who you are and anybody can hide from me for a long time, which is why I like to have a one year probation period, not less than one year. You can hide a month, three months, six months, but it's really hard to fool me for a year. Yeah. That's why a lot of marriages fail in the first 12 months. Right. But it's so that's so curiosity. When they start rambling about what they're good at, it also indicates how much, how curious they are. Sure. Because you can tell from the scope of the discussion, the range of the discussion. Yeah. You know, and the broader the range, the more curious they are. Yeah.

Another one that I asked is, what's the last book you read? And that's not necessarily nice anymore because not very many people read books.

It's discouraging. So the credentials, I was in Quebec, which is kind of French Canada.

And European thinkers are much more who you know rather than what you know. So it's a community. It's a socialization thing more than anything else. And it always bothered me because I'm social, but I hide. people. You're only going to see what I want you to see. Right. There's a Greek expression called herkos odontum, behind the bridge of my teeth. So I'm hiding over here. My wife says, everybody knows everything about you. I said, you want to bet? How else would I want to look at curiosity other than the range of their discussion topics and how they look at things? I think that I think that exposes curiosity.

Yeah. Yeah, it's quite easy to see. In fact, it's not fair. Once people see that that's in training them on hiring and interviewing, once they see how I approach it, they don't want to be interviewed anymore. The worst case was I went to Finning in British Columbia and I had two days of interviews,10 or 12 guys. And the guy who was the vice president of human resources, his name was Charlie Lewis, one of the best HR guys I've ever met. And that's what he was all about. I don't care what you know. I want to know who you are. And it's kind of like who you're going to go to war with. You know, the old, the people in the boat, you know, who do I trust? Well, let's go. Yeah. It's kind of interesting.

I call that the command and control camp.

That's so ridiculous.

Well, the trouble with that is the audience, the team, sees it. And, you know, the person who's exposing themselves doesn't understand that they have.

Yeah, it's not part of who they are.

There was a canned meat. company in Canada. I think it was called Spam, but I can't recall for sure. And it was two cans of processed meat talking to each other. Okay. One can saying to the other, say moo, oink. Say moo, oink. Why can't you say moo? It just isn't in it. And it's the same thing with people. I don't mean to sound so cynical, but I am. I love seeing people get excited. about anything. I don't care what it is. If you can get excited about something, you can get excited about anything. It's just a question of how we look at things. So that whole interview, credential, experience, your skill set, not fitting into a box for somebody else, that somebody else box has to change. And I think we're at the cusp of that now as a society, as a workforce. We're going to have teams, not positions. And the leadership role will move around the team as the process changes. And our culture, America and Japan, I keep Kaizen, I love. We don't do that.

I'm going to teach you. I'm going to show you what I want you to do, what your job is. And I'm going to tell you what I just showed you. And I'm going to show you again. Then you're going to try and I'm going to watch and I'll correct you. And then I'm going to leave you and say, okay, Sarah, keep at that. Get faster. Make less mistakes. You're going to get really good. But it's my rut I'm putting you in.

And I hate that. Don't tell me what to do. Let me figure it out. Yeah. That's why people don't like it.

Exactly. What do you want to have? What's the goal? Yeah. So I have a thing that I call a trigger for process improvement. I call it five things. You mentioned this before. And I do it all the time. And it's a remarkable exercise. And if you can get people in a team thinking that way, it's really beneficial. So then let me go to the next one. Have you ever been involved in a group interview where you've had four or five people on a panel with 20 people in a room being interviewed?

What do you think about 20 or 30 people being interviewed at the same time?

It was an eight hour interview. Wow. And there were 30 of us. Okay. And it was for the prison.

And they were looking for a control figure.

So what do you think they wanted the interviewees to do?

And guess who did?

It's kind of like you look around, you say, okay, if I'm going to get this job, I have to eat everybody else here.

Southwest Airlines does the same thing when they're hiring for cabin crew. Flight crew, customer service people. And they have a panel of employees that do the same job, HR and others that are in maybe six to seven people. And they've got 20 or 30 people being interviewed. And one of the questions they ask is, what's the most embarrassing moment you've had in your life and how did you handle it?

So if you get into a group interview, you've got to be very focused on what it is you're trying to find out, right? Sure.

So one of the answers, this was a Harvard Business Review case study film that I used in training programs. And one of the ladies who was interviewing for the job said, well, this will probably be the most embarrassing moment that I've experienced. Because I'm not normally that positive. And right there, you win, right? Yeah. You love the kid because she's being open and honest with you. I'm not very comfortable about this, but here I am. Yeah. Yeah, it really touched a nerve with me, the credentials and experience. I don't know that there's an answer, but I think we're, as a society in the workforce, we're moving in that direction.

Yeah. Like, I'd like to say that if you've got the right leader, the people, if you hire properly, will go through a wall for them. Sure. They will not go home until that problem is solved. Period. They'll sleep on the floor until it's solved. Period. It's silly. And they, you know, they'll welcome it. They want to do it.

Because I sleep.

Yeah. And you've all probably, if you ever got together as a group again, that's the first thing you're going to talk about. You're going to talk about moments that were special.

Have I told you, I ran a software company when I came down to the States and it was for the equipment world. And it always used to drive me crazy when they sent out new releases. Because you get out to the dealership and you put it in, you're going to do it and something goes wrong. Sure. So they come to me and they say, okay, we've got a new release. We want to send it out this weekend. I said, have you tested it and everything works? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So let's delay it a week. You guys come in tomorrow morning, Saturday, load it up, and let's talk about it on Monday. They did and they couldn't get the computer working for half the day. Yeah. So Monday comes in and I said, okay, fine. If that ever happens again, I'm recognizing all of you. So when you release something fresh, if it blows up, you're done. Now, I'm not going to tell you how to do it. Figure it out. Everybody understand what we're up to? Yes. Okay.

So when can you issue that release? We'll let you know. And they never had another problem because they didn't previously understand the consequence. Sure. And that's the other part of hiring.

One of the things, and give me your thinking on this, one of the things that bothers me a lot is anytime I hire somebody, I'm not hiring them for that job. I'm hiring for the next job. Every time I promote somebody, I'm not promoting them to that job, I'm promoting to the next job. What do you think of that thinking?

It's a very common problem. And, you know, in tests, they always tell you whatever your first instinct is, do it. Don't second guess yourself and change your answer. Whatever you think is the right one at the beginning, do it. More often than not, it is.

It makes a difference, doesn't it? If you're thinking for the next one. Sure.

I think you've heard me say the reason I left working for a company is that it was politics and babysitting I don't like and I'm not good at either. What I did like and what I still like is how can we make that better? Everything we do, I love Kaizen as an operating principle in life. You know, how can I make this better? And we don't ask that of workers enough, my opinion. You know, that's why that five things would, you know, what would you like to change that would make your life at work easier, better, happier? What's a pain in the butt? What process or what improvement would make the company more successful? Those three things, just as a... You know, every month. Let's find one every month and do it.

And then guess what? You start seeing attributes in people that you never thought.

Well, they also know that they're on the stage now. They got to do, you know. And the other thing that gets nasty is I used in the consulting world when I started, I said, you know, you don't really want me to do that job for you, do you? Yeah. I can, you know. And then it's the same thing with you. You've got to find a way to take all those disparate skills that intimidate people because it doesn't allow them to pigeonhole you somewhere. Right. which then causes them to overlook some of the benefit that they would have of having those disparate skills working with them. And as we go forward, you know, there's some people that are saying out there now that in the workforce 20,40 years from now, there's only going to be 5% of the people that are actually going to be change artists. Everybody else will be robotic process transactions. I don't want to be in that world unless I'm in the 5%.

But how do you broaden, how do you make it more than 5 %?

So go back to GE where you were. Back to Deming and Duran and continuous improvement in 1980. It's 43,45 years later, six segmenter Welsh. The teaching that Welsh did on a weekly basis with employees and management. How, what percentage do you think there is of the GE workforce that are the creators versus the followers and doers?

Yeah, I think so too. That Ruthless Equity book that I mentioned? Yeah. Caroline, my daughter, is going through explaining how it worked in the teaching world. And I said, okay, fine. You've worked in three different schools and districts. That's about 100 teachers. How many of those teachers do you think would get this, this process? And she said, well, maybe 30%, maybe 30%. I said, okay. There's 10 million teachers in America. That means that there's 7 million teachers that are no good for the kids. How do you overcome that?

Can you imagine that? And you've got kids going to school.

That's the same as my granddaughter and grandson. My granddaughter got a 5.4 or something GPA in high school. Okay. And the principal, that's impossible. Like the maximum is four. How do you do that? My grandson, just like your son, what are you interested in? He aces. Yeah. So he's in the new program at University of South Carolina right now with the Navy. And there's 31 people in the class. OK. And I never realized how competitive he is. But two weeks ago, he was number 10. Now he's number five. I said, well, what's to my daughter? I said, what the hell is the deal? I didn't know that. He said, well, Caroline said to me, he wants he's found the job he wants. I said, OK, what is that? He said, well, everybody wants this job. OK. It's on the computer. It's in Nipols, Italy. And you're never on a ship. And there's a line. I mean, there's one job. So that's what his current mission is right now.

You know, again, have a meaningful goal whether you're able to do it or not.

So tell me about Iceland.

Do you want to go back next year or the year after?

Monday, Monday or Tuesday, I was talking to a guy who's a retired CEO of a multi-billion dollar company in distribution. He's got two sons. One son's living in Indonesia. He's got a health. business through Bali and that particular area. He's having a ball. His other son, his first degree was anthropology. Got bored with that. Then he took finance.

Became an MBA. Then worked for one of the financial houses. Got bored with that. Became a mechanic. Has worked in oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico and West Texas for the last little while. He's back home again. Now he wants to teach. And I'm jealous. Yeah. So this kid's got it going. If he's not happy, he moves.

Yeah, he wants to be happy at what he does. Can you imagine how many people in the workforce today would kill to be happy about what their work is? Isn't that true? Yeah.

So let me not let that go. How can that be problematic?

Okay, but as long as I'm getting the work done...

You don't have an issue with me.

Should we adjust our thinking and let them do it the way they want to do it, period?

On a manufacturing floor or on a repair floor, I have standard times for jobs. And I say to the employee, I'll give you a choice. I'm going to give you eight hours of labor every day. If you finish after six hours, you can leave or... I'll give you two hours more work and I'll pay you for 10 hours today. What do you think happens there? Is my boss upset with me by doing that?

They were upset when I would let them go home.

That was my argument. These guys are 20 or 30 years older than I am and I'm in my 20s and early 30s. You're nuts, Ron.

You know what happened, Sarah? The guys that were good on Thursday or Friday, they would finish after five or six hours. They go home, they go to the bar, they go with their wife to dinner or whatever the heck it is. And the younger guys are looking at it saying, I want to be like him when I grow up. Yeah. How do I get to be that? And they start, you know, here we go. Right. Yeah. And my boss was, he did not want me to do it. He said, you'll do it, but it'll blow up. I'll let you do it. It's okay, but it's going to blow up. Didn't blow up.

time to say it's okay.

And if I'm hiring credentials, not experience, that's not going to happen.

Hiring credentials, they'll want to pay more. They won't let the guy go home early. Right. It's a really interesting switch question, isn't it?

then i don't care then

there's an old story oh 40 50 years ago about a plant that had been the leading manufacturing plant in the industry for decades and they had international competition that came in from europe and from asia that outstripped their productive capability and capacity dramatically. And the company had a meeting and told the employees that they were going to have to shut down in three months time.

Because they needed to be able to get 50% more production per shift in order for the plant to stay in business. So the employees knew what they needed to do to protect their jobs. It took them a little bit of time, but they got it up to that productive level. And they kept it there for a couple of four weeks. So now the management leadership went back down to the floor and said, OK, boys, congratulations. We can stay open. Do you think you're going to be able to continue to do that? And they were honest and said no. The plant shut. Had the plant operated at that capacity, let's say 80% instead of double. Yeah. Competition never would have arrived. The barrier to entry in anything is really an interesting position. Today, we have people selling equipment, cars, washing machines, whatever. We used to have salesmen at a store that had to tell the customer what the specifications were, what the benefits were, and all the rest.

Today, with Google and other sources, I don't need to go anywhere. I know more than the guy who's selling to me.

I've got to change my whole game. How do you differentiate yourself anymore? in the customer service world. Is it credentials or is it experience? But the other part of the experience, you have to get started

order to get experience. And I really, my granddaughter, I don't know what I'm going to do. I said, it doesn't matter. Get something. Start. Get a flavor. See what you like and don't like in the workplace. You found it out in school. Now do it in a job. Yeah. I don't know if we've answered the question, but I think we've beat it up a lot. I thought the blog was right on the money, you know, the experience or credentials. I think that's a very important question for everybody to be addressing.

That's the ruthless equity state.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You're hiring Joe.

That does this to me.

That's another subject for another blog and podcast. Job descriptions I do not write. I write function descriptions.

And the function has. specific purposes and goals. That's right. And then, okay, so there's the framework. You know, there's the picture. It's 18 by 12. Here's your canvas. It's blank. Here's the colors. Go for it. And you make it. And show me along the way. Give me, well, you want to try that maybe. Or do you ever think about this? Because you can influence people.

Pardon?

Well, it requires curious problem solvers. And curiosity is not going to be looking for a pattern. And problem solvers don't care what's in the way. No. So it's a nice combination, but it's very rare, Sarah. At least in my experience, it's a very rare combination to find people that have your attributes, as an example, and skills and experiences that can be brought to bear. Because you're a generalist, which is, to me, the best statement I can make to anybody. I'd like to think of myself as a jack of all trades. Master unknown, I'm an 80,90 percenter. I'm never going to be 100 percenter in my life ever.

right.

You have to take one of ours. I don't think you've even taken one of ours.

I've got to get Caroline to set you up with one. It's five to six hours. I should warn you. Okay. So do an hour a week, take a month, and then we'll talk about it. Yeah, that sounds great. And I'd like you to critique the hell out of it.

Thank you very much, Sarah. And thank everybody who's been listening to this podcast. I hope you've gotten something out of it. I sure have. And Sandra, Sarah. Mahalo from Hawaii. Thank you very much. Bye now. Thank you for listening to our podcast. We appreciate your support. Should you have any thoughts or comments, please don't hesitate to contact us at www. learningwithoutscars. com. The time is now. Mahalo.