Being Aware of Expectations

The general theme of this series is to create awareness for the core issues in the workplace. In my last two articles, I wrote about my friend Helen and her issues with motivation and company values. I’m going to give tired Helen a break and use an example of my own personal experience for this next one.

Earlier on in my career when I was working as a recruiter, I interviewed with a large recruiting firm who was successful, had a reputation of integrity and was ranked as one of the best places to work in the Bay Area. I highly enjoyed my interviews with the Branch Manager and the Regional Manager. They were both strong, intelligent women who valued quality recruiting. The conversations were warm and personally sympathetic. It was early in my career and I was eager to grow with strong mentorship and these two would be an excellent match for me.

During my final interview, the three of us were discussing the expectations and responsibilities of the position. The company had structured goals for their recruiters, one of which was making a certain amount of weekly cold calls. At this point in the conversation, we came to a roadblock. I explained in detail how I am not a sales person.

In my previous roles at boutique recruiting firms, my managers would do the sales portion of taking in a new role to work on and I would find the best people. My experience and education gave me an excellent background using psychology and intuitive techniques to make great matches quickly. I worked on quality, not quantity and spent my time on research and interviews with the hiring teams and the prospective hires. My managers understood that I was a thoughtful and sensitive person, which led me to being good at empathising and understanding people, but very bad at cold calls. This system was highly successful for me.

Allowing me to focus on psychology and not sales, gave me the room to do well and keep advancing my skills. This in turn created a happy, loyal and growing client base. My placed candidates were often managers and they in turn would come to me for their hiring needs in their new companies. By doing a great job, I didn’t need cold calling, I had word of mouth marketing.

After I explained this to my prospective bosses and knowing that the company required sales calls, they should have thanked me for my time and ended our interview process. However, they were in agreement with me regarding the value of my recruiting and working style and they were excited to have my kind of recruiting on their team. To make it work, they came up with a solution to funnel me sales leads from the account team and my only sales-like expectation was to then foster the relationships. No sales calls.

The little niche they created for me didn’t last long. The issue; the company culture was built on sales, not other aspects of the recruiting function. Their values and goals reflected this. Even broader was that almost all recruiting firms worked this way. It was industry standard.

Shortly after joining, it became clear that I was excepted, just as the rest of the team was, to make sales calls. It started with just making calls from soft leads and then they added pressure to make cold calls. I tried it and it didn’t work. It made me nervous and riddled with anxiety. Who was I to demand attention from a stranger? I felt awful about interrupting people when they were just trying to do their jobs. As soon as someone on the phone told me they weren’t interested, I was the first to apologise for wasting their time and letting them know it was perfectly fine if they never wanted to talk to me again. It just wasn’t my nature to try to convince someone they needed my service when they didn’t even want it.

Each week during our 1on1 I would sit with my manager and we would go over my numbers. Every time she would have to tell me that I’m not meeting my required number of calls and I would again have to explain why I am not a sales person. We would try to find solutions to the problem of my not making cold calls, but she was having an increasingly difficult time defending me to the higher ups and the team.

Then both the mangers who hired me left the company and I started to work directly with the VP. Without the protection of the two who had hired me, I was left vulnerable. I had to explain myself and try to convince my new boss that my style was successful and that sales calls were not a resourceful use of my time. Every day was getting more stressful as the team dynamics deteriorated and the pressure grew heavier.

As much as we tried to make it work with sales trainings and despite whatever else I brought to the organisation, this vital focus of the culture and work was not something I could match. There were standards that we all had to meet regardless of the expectations set in my interviews. It wasn’t working, we were not a fit for each other and this created deep frustration and high stress with myself, the team and my managers. Finally, they let me go.

In my case, even though we were all trained interviewers and they acted with the best intentions, the hiring team still made a major mistake. They had the complete facts of what I could bring to them and what I couldn’t. They knew what the company and industry required of recruiters but they thought they could work around it. They set false expectations for us all by overestimating their own autonomy and not thinking about the team dynamics. It came from a good place, they had role to fill, they were excited about me and wanted to create a niche for my unique working style, but by ignoring the very real facts, they put me in a position to fail.

It was a painful learning experience for all of us. Even embarrassing as we were all recruiting professionals, yet we were making the biggest mistake of all, a bad hire.

From that experience, I learned to move away from working in recruiting firms to focus on consulting, creative problem solving and HR. A key element of my work now is to help clients with their hiring issues. Such as; positions that have been open too long, high turnover, interview training or strategic exercises to determine who is the right person for the job and team.

After working in the field for over 15 years, it is glaringly clear that strategic hiring and team building is extremely important but underrated by managers, and it costs them. Bad hires are expensive. Not just in the cost which is up to 30% of the employees first year salary but the time of the colleagues to interview and train, stress of trying to force a fit and the negative affect on culture.

Even before the interview process begins, mistakes happen. This is more prevalent in the startup world where managers are often new to the role and are required to build teams too quickly to adjust for culture changes and integration of new people. In most cases, managers have never received interview training and have not had education or practical experience to understand how to build a well functioning team. In these situations, managers have to go with their intuition of how they form relationships. This is problem because an interview is not a date or making a new friend, it’s about finding the best person for the company.

Evaluating the needs for the role and then hiring to fit those needs is a strategic process that quickly gets side lined by emotions and a shifting of priorities and circumstances. Hiring is dynamic and managers must work hard to flow with these constant changes while staying focused on the core of the role and the needs of the company. The reality is that as strategic as we would like hiring to be, we must compromise on some things because there is no perfect person. However it is vital that managers be clear on where they can compromise versus what is foundational to the role and the company.

As managers, hiring is a significant responsibility that needs to be given the training, professional attention and objective approach to make practical decisions about team and company needs. From my story, we see that even with training, it’s still a difficult task to make hiring decisions that are based on fact and to honestly translate what our intuition is telling us.

The key to making good hiring decisions is understanding the needs of the organisation and to be proactive in identifying what limitations or biases that you might bring to the interview process. For training and consultation about hiring coaching and development, email me at arela@featuredpeople.com.