Do The Work

Memos to the Universe

Archive for category TO: Line Managers

Waffle House to James Beard Award? Great Hiring

Aug 1

Posted by Frannyo in TO: Line Managers, TO: Owner or CEO, To: HR | 4 Comments

Bryan Caswell of Houston’s current favorite restaurant, Reef, has some very smart things to say about hiring.  Caswell commented that he strongly prefers to hire chefs who’ve worked at The Waffle House, a southern breakfast chain.  Jason Sheehan, food critic for the Seattle Weekly and another former Waffle House chef agreed. Take a look at Caswell’s short comments:

Caswell has it exactly right. When looking at a set of resumes, I’ll pick the person with hard-won experience, particularly restaurant or farm experience,  over fancy schools any day.  Similarly, I’ll almost always pick the candidate with a lower GPA who worked their way through school over the candidate who has a high GPA but hasn’t ever had to make rent or pay their own bills.

Don’t be mesmerized by big-name colleges or Fortune 100 experience – go with the person who can show you that they made home runs the old-fashioned way, not just by being born on third base and getting a walk. I’ve rarely seen people successfully move from a huge company to a very small one, and have often seen people with lots of small company, high intensity, broad experience help grow their companies into very big, very successful ones.  They don’t fool themselves that privilege is the same as talent. And neither should you.

Don’t Try This At Home

Jul 28

Posted by Frannyo in TO: Line Managers, To: HR | 6 Comments

After fifteen years in HR and recruiting, a Masters, an SPHR, and reading a book or two about interviewing, I kinda have hiring down. I am a complete harpy about hiring managers who “go with their gut,” aka “listen to their lunch.” I am a ruthless reference checker, using every trick in the book to suss out fibs, exaggerations, and real feedback. I learned in grad school that references, done properly, are more accurate assessors of a future employee’s success than interviews, and spend as much time checking references as I do sourcing or interviewing.  In other words, I’m a bit of a hiring know-it-all process snob.
My company is filling several beginner engineer positions in Houston. The ideal candidate is a Chemical Engineer with strong people skills and a high level of initiative who wants to work for 35% below market for first-year Chemical Engineer graduates. I’ve just completed several days in a row of phone screens and face to face interviews for some beginner engineer positions, explaining the career growth curve in consulting and the demands of consulting in general and this job in particular. (I’m a big believer in transparency in the hiring process.) I had found some good candidates who seemed like they could do it, but few seemed truly excited about the job – particularly the social aspects of the job.
mmm...cookies
Then, after one more lunch in which the latest candidate said that she had a lot to think about but she’d call us, a kid in a suit showed up in our lobby. Bearing cookies. Delicious, warm, chocolate chip cookies. He introduced himself as one of the candidates I’d been playing phone tag with, and asked if I had five minutes to visit face-to-face. He ended up going through our entire interview process in our break room, talking to hiring managers and potential peers over cookies and coffee. His answers were solid, his hands shook a little but he stayed engaged with everyone and asked great questions, and he was completely respectful of the fact that he might be taking up too much time given his unexpected arrival. I checked through all my typical interview questions for the job – now that I include potential peers in interviews, they ask most of them for me, but sometimes they miss one or two. I probed. I pushed. I looked everywhere for inconsistencies – and there just weren’t any. This kid had it.
Reader, I hired him. On the spot.
Okay – actually contingent on our usual background and reference checks. I may have been listening to my lunch. I’m checking his references today but my guess is, his story will check out completely – he is just one of the young people who’ve gotten caught up in this bad economy and has had to learn to show more initiative and creativity than the competition. His actions and his answers were completely congruent with a great future leader at our company, and we have a good story and a full belly to boot. Maybe we can get him to make us bacon chocolate chip cookies for his first annual review.

For Shame.

Jul 23

Posted by Frannyo in TO: Applicants, TO: Line Managers, TO: Owner or CEO, To: Staff | No Comments

You may remember that earlier last year I featured Laurie-Ellen Shumaker in my series on great people who need to get back to  work. Laurie-Ellen was recently also featured at the Huffington Post in a series on the unemployed in America. This brief article part of their “Bearing Witness” project designed to highlight the effects of this recession on real families.

The story was fine. The comments were mostly ignorant, judgemental, and angry. For example, a user who defames a Texan great lady with the username LadyBirdJohnson wrote, “…Your story does not add up and is full of self pity and drama. Most of the time when people have trouble they only need to look at themselves to blame. Maybe you should be asking what role you played in this mess you find yourself? Actually, your story sounds as make believe as your unicorn.”  Self-righteous comments like this go on for 26 pages, thus far.

Brene Brown, A Houston-based researcher,  studies shame for a living. (I know, right? Talk about a Dirty Job) This talk she gave at the UP Experience summarizes her work beautifully. Go watch it.  It takes 25 minutes. I’ll wait.

Back so soon? Isn’t her work challenging and intriguing?

Brown notes that we most severely judge others in areas that we ourselves feel insecure.  We do everything we can to create a wall between ourselves and those we see as failing or less than ourselves. As the economy continues to lag and jobs remain in scarce supply, the self-righteousness level of our coworkers, family members, and friends may continue to ratchet up. The comments in the HuffPo story are a perfect example of that phenomenon.