It was another beautiful summer afternoon in the Silicon
Valley. Many employees gathered after
work to play basketball near one of the main gyms on campus. We went through and did the free throw shoot
around to determine teams. As I looked
at my teammates, one of them stood out to me.
He stood about 6 foot 3 and must have been about 300+ pounds. As the game began, I was running point and
doing my job of distributing the ball around to my teammates to set the flow of
the game. As I guarded my opponent, I
timed his crossover and punched the ball out for a turnover. I start running down the court looking for
any trailers on my team. As I looked up
there he was, jogging down opposite side of me.
I did an overhead pass to him and with a grace I had not expected he glides
down the lane, finger rolls the ball gracefully off the backboard right in for
the score. He turns around back down
court, put his hands up, shrugged his shoulders and hollered out “give the fat
boy a chance, give the fat boy a chance!”
People are More Than Search Criteria
How often do we as human beings judge those around us? With the abundance of information on the
Internet and now our dependence on mobile devices, there is a firehose of
information that is grasping for our attention every millisecond of the
day. In order to make sense of this
large distorted unstructured quantity of information, we naturally
compartmentalize, modularize and filter down this information so that we can
process it. This is at the core of why
search is such a powerful tool in whatever software or applications that we
depend on in our daily lives. However,
we as a society have boxed ourselves in with this way of thinking.
The Home Buyer
I got off a call with a potential real estate client and it dawned
on me how much this is ingrained in us.
The majority of new customers I interview in that first requirements
meeting, often immediately jump to the search parameters right away, rather to
what they are really looking for. The
question I love to ask is what is your dream home and what does that look
like. Customers often get stumped and
take a moment, but then the real story comes flowing through as they are
allowed to dream a bit. In that daydream
is where I get the humanity of the person rather than the mechanical search criteria’s
we are so programmed to enter into a web form.
Because at the core of a person you will find what they are really
looking for and often that which they didn’t even know about themselves. You find for the parent they are looking for
a safe area and yard space for their children to play, a neighborhood of kids,
a great school for their kids to thrive or a fully re-modeled home that
requires little work. The younger working
professional is the complete opposite of the parent and really wants to live in
a place surrounded by festivities, be close to work, wants newer properties
with very low maintenance. You may meet
the retiree that have been through both of those phases and are thinking about
how to structure their home for their children, having trouble handling the
large amount of yard work or paying off the home and minimizing the tax burden
as they no longer have income. These are
some examples of what we as human beings think and worry about in our lives and
it is so much more than boxes in a search form.
Great Job but…
I once interviewed a candidate for a development position. He had all the right skillsets, tools and
experiences that we needed. At the time
the decision was to put him in a contractor position. So we put this person at the forefront,
developing the core of our system. A
year later, his work was front and center of production code and literally very
few bugs where found. I then advocated
that we should bring this person on full time.
The answer I got was the school he went to would never pass our high
standard for hiring. I could not believe
this answer. This type of thinking is
weeding out a large amount of ambitious talent that may not have had the
resources or desire at one point in their lives but have evolved and found it
at a later time. In your companies’
battle for talent, try to see past the standard checkboxes. There are many talented people that are
hungry and looking for an opportunity.
Top Talent
Having worked at Technology companies for over 13 years, I have
watched hiring practices play out in day-to-day execution. Companies in the valley focus on this idea of
“top talent” often defined by a narrow set of degrees with a narrow set of top
schools. What I have seen is that there
is a high quality of smart individuals brought in but they often end up working
on mundane tasks. There are a limited
amount of top priority cutting edge R&D projects as compared to the bugs
that need to be fixed in existing code every day. Why are we so obsessed with finding top
talent? In fact a staggered team makes
more sense so that not everyone is not for the same promotions. A tiered team of Junior, Mid-level, Senior
and Architects would also ensure there is work that is challenging for each
level and encourages collaboration to help each other improve their skills
together.
Measuring Heart
I will never forget an interview candidate that I was interviewing
for an Engineering position. Question
after question he could not get to the answers that I was asking. At the end of the interview I was perplexed
and I was a sure no on this candidate. A
few days later my Manager and I de-briefed and I mentioned how he could not
answer any of my questions. My Manager
looked up at me with a confused look as he had asked similar questions to mine
and the candidate passed with flying colors.
We both stopped for a moment and concluded that he studied and learned
Unix in a day. In many companies my “no”
would have meant this candidate would not have gotten the job and we would have
continued looking. But in this instant,
we saw the passion and work ethic of this individual and decided this was a
person worth bringing on-board. Just a
few years later, this hard working employee climbed the ranks quickly and is
now a principal engineer. To think we
would have missed out on this talent if we had followed standard protocol.
Look Around You
Look around you at your peers, those you manage, your family and
your friends. Do any of these people
have the potential to be that top talent you have been desperately looking for?
A true leader identifies undervalued
talent and turns them into superstars.
Is there someone around you looking for a chance to show you that they
can do the job with passion, heart and effectiveness? Give them a chance and they just might exceed
your expectations.
PS> If you were the teammate who I played with so many years ago,
send me a message I’d love to catch up, you inspire me!
