DBA HR Solutions - News

We are currently helping a fast growing and dynamic company, based in Stockton on Tees, to recruit a Software Development Team Lead to help them increase the pace of their growth even further which will include growth into mainland Europe. This is a rare opportunity to join a (currently) small team and to gain positive self-development in a supportive and challenging working environment.

As the Software Development Team Lead the larger proportion of your time will still be spent developing software but this is always done with a close connection between the developer(s) and their end clients. If you want to break out of being disconnected from your individual effort and contribution (and their impacts for end users) then this would be a suitable role for you.

Fast-tracking your career and experience isn’t always easy – not usually within the same company that’s for sure. My client’s firm belief is in giving their team members early responsibility and encouraging them to develop themselves quickly. The reason is simple – as a company they want to continue to grow quickly and can only do that if their team members do exactly the same. We want to recruit a Software Development Team Lead who naturally buys into that concept and can develop a team in exactly the same way.

Their individual growth philosophy is to:

• give challenging and meaningful work projects to their team members that will test them both technically and personally
• have none of the traditional artificial barriers in the way of personal growth

Customer focus, Continuous product improvement & New Product Development are their key strategic and operational focus, so the ability to actively engage with their customers, when necessary, will be a key strength in anyone taking this exciting role. Although there will inevitably be a good part of your time spent creating software, you must also seamlessly interact directly with customers whose sole interest is in what the product can give them as opposed to how beautifully the code is written.

To match your personal strengths, you will need strong technical proficiency with SaaS applications running on Windows and Linux operating systems, excellent coding skills (they are a Java house) and if you can show similar competence with Apache Web Server and Tomcat Servlet Container that would be welcomed. They warmly embrace new technologies and openly encourage new thinking.

We can offer you a strong remuneration package and benefits as well as the opportunity to become a shareholder in the business. But if this last sentence was the one you were really waiting for, perhaps you have missed the point of our advert?

Salary: £45000 – £55000, Strong salary + Bonus, Enhanced Pension

Please apply to

enquiries@dba-hrsolutions.com

(quoting ref – ‘SDTL/09/17′) with your CV and a cover letter outlining your current remuneration package and key motivations for applying for this role.

NO AGENCIES

In companies today the outlay of capital expenditure is submitted to rigorous scrutiny.

Hours upon hours of management time (and no little heartache!) are poured into trying to ensure it will deliver the very best for your venture before you buy it, and testing that the item will be able to stand the stresses of what it will be expected to do.

• Can it work at the right pace?
• Will it start when you ask it to and respond reliably over time?
• Will it deliver the right level of quality to show this business in the very best light?
• Will it give the customer what they want?
• Can you reasonably expect it to work effectively with your other machinery?
• Does it have any particular quirks and foibles that may make it difficult to work with?
• Does it have a proven track record?
• How flexible are the outputs you can expect from it?
• What level of output can it sustain under normal conditions?
• What if you had an unexpected surge in demand – could it respond?
• How can it be developed in the future if it needs to grow with the business?

All this, and more besides, for a piece of machinery. No doubting that it is all good solid stuff. But what do you do about your investment in your people before you ‘buy’ them? After all it’s a very common observation from managers of most businesses that it is the people that cause the most problems – not the machinery. Think about it, all the above questions apply equally to your potential investment in people. And people can represent a much greater level of investment in pounds than most companies ever contemplate ‘shelling out’ on equipment.

I must point out that I fully accept (before an enraged reader feels compelled to phone me and put a rather large bee in my capex!) that all the effort in buying capital equipment is essential risk management. What I would like to persuade people to do is also regard the effective hiring of staff as essential risk management. If you want to recruit good people, and keep them, you must make sure your recruitment processes address all the key areas to help you get, and keep, a good employee.

One key first observation is that whatever you do in your recruitment process you must make sure that it is done professionally. If your recruitment effort comes across to the candidate as unprofessional, disorganised and poorly structured, the candidate will be left with the impression that the rest of your business is much the same. Make sure that anyone involved in recruiting people for your business knows the standards that you expect of them.

The following must not be a part of how you recruit:

• keeping the candidate waiting well past their allotted time
• being poorly prepared for the interview
• not reading the CV beforehand
• even worse, actually admitting to not having read it in front of the candidate
• spending most of the interview telling the candidate about the company or the interviewer’s ‘greatness’
• failing to thank the candidate for attending conducting the interview
• using the ‘good cop/bad cop’ routine
• making overblown statements about career prospects

I’m sure you can think of others. If not ask your staff for bad examples from their past, they won’t struggle to give you a few!

For most companies, at least for those that have yet to see ‘the light’, the process of recruitment revolves around two things – how quickly and how cheaply can they recruit someone. Time and time again this is the root cause of the ‘people’ difficulties further down the line that managers complain so regularly about. Nevertheless far too many managers continue to operate with these two drivers underpinning how they run a recruitment campaign. Putting a bum on a seat may well tick the box on the To Do list, but all too often it creates a long list of new To Do’s aimed at managing the after-effects of a poor choice. That choice is the fault of the recruiting company and NOT the interviewee. They made the offer in the first place, the interviewee merely said “yes”.

Most companies rely heavily, if not exclusively, on the traditional face-t0-face interview alone in order to select their staff. It clearly has an important place in the overall process but it has long been accepted that the interview has many flaws in its make up. These are made worse if the interviewers are lacking in skill and experience. The interview will also not effectively target several elements of the risk inherent in securing the best candidate.

Staying in their comfort zones means most interviewers focus on the technical knowledge and qualifications areas highlighted in Figure 1.1. It then becomes an issue of ego for the interviewer who tends to prefer the candidate who is deferential to the interviewer’s achievements and ability. I’m sure there is a psychological complex for this but this author doesn’t know the name for it.

In figure 1.1 it has been assumed that a traditional interview is conducted and that all the interviewers are trained and experienced. With a competent interviewer, they should be able to get reliable evidence for the areas shaded green. For the blue areas it would be ‘hit or miss’ if you found reliable evidence and the red areas wouldn’t be covered. For a large proportion of your key vacancies I’m safe guessing that you would want to assess an individual’s knowledge, skills and experience in the areas shown in figure 1.1. Traditional interview approaches leave more than two thirds of the areas not covered adequately or simply not covered at all – regardless of how good the interviewer is at their job.

Now ask yourself the question – would I risk buying a piece of equipment knowing so little about it? No? Then why buy a member of staff knowing so little about them? It’s quite simply storing up potential problems further down the road of your employment relationship with them. And the type of problems I am referring to are not the gross misconduct type, rather the variety where a new member of staff just isn’t performing against expected standards. As any experienced manager will tell you, the trouble with that sort of problem is that it tends to demand much more management resource to deal with it than a gross misconduct case.

So how can you go about minimising the risk of recruiting someone to a more acceptable level? Some solutions to this involve complex recruitment procedures or the use of expensive consultants, neither of which are absolutely essential. A well-constructed Assessment Centre will target the areas relevant to a particular role with a series of carefully chosen exercises. They don’t need to be expensive. For instance, a comprehensive personality profile could cover management, leadership and even selling styles. It would cost no more than £180-300. The ‘pay off ‘, however, can be significant. Using the personality assessment at a final interview can also produce individually targeted questions that will further reduce the risks when choosing a candidate.

Making sure that your managers are trained in effective questioning and interviewing techniques can be done quickly and costs effectively to help your interviewers get to the issues that really matter. You can then effectively turn each of the red and blue areas in Figure 1.1 to green. No recruitment process is absolutely guaranteed to return perfect results all the time. What is certainly true, however, is that if you target the elements of the process at all the elements of risk, you will have a far greater chance of getting the results you really want for your business.

If you haven’t got an HR department with skilled interviewers, why not ‘contract-in’ that service as and when you need it. Hourly rates for experienced interviewers to sit beside you in the recruitment process should be between£65 and £80. Not too much more than the charge-out rate for a mechanic when your main dealer services your car! And you thought they would be too expensive!

The process of recruitment is riddled with risk – refer back to my article “Recruiting is a Risk Business”. The underlying contention of that article was that any organisation must limit their exposure to risk by systematic, and preferably structured, assessment of all potential candidates. In so doing you should cover the hard and soft skill requirements demanded by the role as it currently stands and for how the organisation needs it to be performed in the foreseeable future.

Determining what these requirements are is critical to the success or otherwise of the recruitment process – if you don’t know where you are supposed to be shooting the arrow, how do you expect it to hit the target? You skimp on this stage at your peril.“Yes, yes, I understand all that!” I hear you say to me with impatience riddled throughout the statement. My 16 years worth of experience, however, tells me that most managers use time constraints as an excuse to devote too little time to this critical early stage in the process.

And yet your whole project, and its chances of success, hinge on this more than any other aspect in the recruitment effort. If you can clearly define what you want when you commence the process, trust me, even an averagely skilled recruiter can spot a well qualified candidate when they see one!

Once the foundations are created you can then build the other aspects around them. That includes the techniques you will use to assess how the candidates match up to your well produced brief.These techniques can be many and varied but are usually bundled together under the heading of psychometric assessment. In my travels the discussions I have had around this subject produce the usual mixed bag from the ‘fervent detractors’ to the ‘devoted supporters club’. So we arrive at the pivotal point in the debate around whether to use these tests or not.

Let’s get quickly to the point:

• Don’t be dissuaded by feedback from candidates who just don’t like doing these sort of assessments – they are not taking the largest part of the risk remember!
• It is estimated that upwards of 2 out of every 5 CVs have significan exaggerations, inaccuracies or even bear faced lies – you need all the help you can get to identify them accurately.
• It is now accepted in all sensible quarters that using interviews alone has strong limitations that discriminate against good candidates that just don’t interview well and yet heap excessive kudos on the skilled interview ‘game player’, or worse, the proficient fraud.
• The added cost of completing psychometric assessment is usually dwarfed by the level of resources the successful candidate must control or by the costs associated with managing a poor performer out of the business.

If you are not convinced by that lot then you must be an ‘I’m a fervent detractor’ t-shirt wearer. In which case read no more!

In chatting to a number of experienced HR professionals and consultants, as well as using my own experience, the consensus is that most senior managers and executives are happy for other people to sit through psychometric assessment but become markedly more hesitant when they discover that they may also be asked to subject themselves to it.

“I’ve been doing the job for years now, if you can’t assess me based upon that, then I don’t see why I should waste my time doing tests.”This is a fairly typical statement from the small proportion of people that choose not to sit tests.That’s their choice, but it’s your choice to set sensible candidate evaluation processes in place and you lower your standards at your peril.

A significant number of HR professionals, and recruitment consultancies, that offer psychometric profiling, are more than happy to use these tools for all levels below senior management but seem reluctant to adopt them for senior managers and directors. Part of this, I’m sure, revolves around embarrassment – being too embarrassed to ask an apparently time-served and highly successful manager to sit through these tests of their competence.

I chatted to an experienced consultant this week who recounted a story of a candidate for a very senior Engineering Manager position. This candidate objected strongly to being subjected to these apparently meaningless tests of his competence and promptly removed himself from the recruitment process. One has to ask, what was his motivation?

Several likely explanations exist – he was nervous of being exposed as less talented than his CV declared; he was not interested enough in the job in the first place to put himself out and complete the assessment; he was ill-informed about the best practice standards applied in recruitment and you’d have to ask what standards he would apply to recruiting members of any team he managed; he was intolerant to the standards being set by people within a different professional discipline to his own and you can only surmise that he would remain less than balanced, and a potential source of conflict with other professional colleagues.

Characters such as this should be bracketed firmly in the ‘no loss’ category. That doesn’t mean that you should be dismissive or rude towards them but you should certainly make no concessions to the standards that you apply. In each case you should try to persuade them that being assessed is a routine part of the process and is only one part of the decision-making criteria. But don’t waste too much time as fervent detractors are usually intractable in their opinions regardless of any argument or evidence. I would contest that they are not the sort of person you would want in your organisation if that is their approach.

A significant change should occur in the focus of your psychometric tools the higher you apply them up the organisational ladder. The shift should move towards closer scrutiny of the soft skills rather than the easy to measure. Retain the verbal and numerical ability tests by all means as they will add some value to debates around a candidate and cost relatively little money to do. However, the key arena of value will be around the leadership skills and management styles the candidate uses. A mismatch here means that all people within their sphere of control could be adversely affected by them once recruited. It is critical therefore to evaluate them as closely as possible. A good recruitment consultant should be able to offer you help in devising a structured approach to the right tools to use.

Unfortunately a lot of recruitment consultants offer only the more limited first interview service. If that describes your recruitment consultant, work instead with one that can help you assess the right candidate all along the way until an offer is made. After all, if they were true partners with you then their goal should be the same as yours, namely ensuring the right candidate is placed into the vacancy you have.

In closing I would argue that far from being less inclined to psychometrically assess senior candidates I would, in fact, be much keener to do so bearing in mind just how much the presence of ineffective soft skills can have a truly hard impact on any business.