We hope you have enjoyed reading the chapters of the ebook by Rob Symes thus far. Today we present you with the third chapter of his inspiring work. Feel free to leave your comments below and let us know your views on processes of recruiting for technology and high growth companies. You can now also access the full version of the ebook here.
365
recruiting
“After
the game… early edition newspapers with SUPER BOWL CHAMPS in bold letters were
being displayed on the field… It was a celebration, but the team builders in
the group were still thinking what was next.
‘For whatever reason what stood
out more than the parties and parades was the reality of how far behind we
were’, Pioli says.”
Michael Holley. War room: The Legacy of Bill
Belichick and the art of building the perfect team
American Football is a laboratory
for studying recruitment. Soccer is not.
Both are worth billions of
dollars, highly competitive and highly scrutinised but crucially American
football has a salary cap. When a rich soccer team, like Chelsea, wants success
they open their chequebook and just buy players. If those players don’t work,
they buy more players. When money is no object, mistakes don’t matter which is
why Chelsea can pay thirty million and a hundred and twenty thousand pounds a
week for Andrei Shevchenko to fail.
American football teams can’t
overpay for players because if they overpay in one position they will have to
underpay in another. In the stark world of the salary cap, NFL(1) teams live and die on their player selections. As Bill Polian, Vice Chairman of
the Indianapolis Colts, says when discussing his choice of Peyton Manning over
Ryan Leaf for the Colts quarterback position “If I had got that wrong…I’d be
across the street, parking cars(2).”
Five years after that selection, Manning was the named the NFL’s Most Valuable
Player. Leaf no longer plays professional American Football.
Foreign billionaires do not fund
most technology companies. Therefore, like the NFL, tech companies live and die
on selection.
There are two crucial differences
when assessing how NFL teams and technology companies recruit:
Ø
NFL teams source and assess candidates continuously throughout the year.
Technology companies source and assess candidates intermittently usually when they have a direct recruitment need.
Ø
Although NFL
teams have extensive scouting teams (the equivalent of internal recruiters) the
General Manager (the equivalent of the CEO) is constantly involved and often
drives the process. In technology companies the CEO and executive team are
often removed from the process after deciding on a job description until they
take part in a final assessment.
In Michael Lewis’s book, The
Blind Side, College Head Coach Nick Saban flew hundreds of miles to visit star
high school American Football player Michael Oher at his home. While trying to
persuade Oher to play for Louisina
State University, he charmed Oher’s mother by commenting
on the material of her curtains.
If technology companies change their mind-set
from stop-start to constant and their executive team from hands off to hands
on, the competitive rewards are bigger than an NFL team’s payroll.
Let’s take a hypothetical
situation: A tech firm with 100 employees, double-digit growth
and the expectation that they’ll need to recruit at least twenty members of
staff during the next year. Now I would
prefer every one of these employees to be involved in recruitment but some
might call this unrealistic. Let’s just use the senior team of five: the CEO,
CTO, COO, VP of Sales and VP of HR. Let’s conservatively say they work 250 days
during that year and instead of spending whole days on recruitment they just
spend twenty minutes purely on sourcing prospective candidates. Ten minutes on
building a relationship with a source, ten minutes on speaking to a referral.
They do this every day, without fail.
Over the course of the year they
will collectively have spoken to 5,000 prospective candidates and because it
was purely through referral their quality is to some extent prequalified.
Instead of advertising and scrambling for recruits they have a pool of 5,000.
Most companies will complain that
senior executives don’t have time for this. NFL executives are busy too. But
there is a quantum leap in effort, professionalism, thoroughness, attention to
detail and assessment between technology companies and the NFL.
Most
technology companies will continue to recruit B players because recruiting A
Players is so damn hard. However, the smart tech companies will see this as
opportunity
[1] The NFL is the
National Football League, the professional form of American football.
[2] From George Anders book, The Rare Find
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