Are Your People a Drag or a Sail?

We staff a lot of new initiatives. And we’re often brought in when executives want to rethink how they have staffed a position.

So I regularly hear how executives talk about the intersection of strategy and people. And some executives describe their current staff like a tractor pull–a powerful engine (strategy) is dragging a heavy sled behind it (the current staff).

Organizations often say “people are our most important asset” but people are also the source of most of your problems.  People often disappoint you. Top performers quit. Average performers often fail to deliver. Bottom performers threaten to sue. Departments go to war with each other. You spend less time than you want leading new initiatives and more time than you want refereeing internal squabbles. And when I see that, I usually see an understaffed, underfunded, underwhelming HR department awaiting further instructions from the executive team.

It does not have to be that way. In great organizations the culture fuels the strategy. The HR strategy supports the business strategy. Your systems, processes, expectations and rituals give lift and propulsion to your strategy, like a sail pulling you forward.

People are not your most important asset. People come and go. How you harness human achievement is your most important asset, and your only enduring source of competitive advantage.

The systems and processes of dealing with people are where the magic happens.

• How you attract great people, and how you recognize and deploy the internal talent you already have
• How you align the people to the mission.
• How you consistently inspire top performance from your people.
• How you retain the most valuable and drive away the least valuable.
• How you gracefully exit the people who no longer drive results.
• And how you do all this at a price you can afford.

Competent HR keeps you in compliance with the law. Great HR practices transform people from a drag into propulsion.

Managing Expectations in the Hiring Process

Have you ever interviewed an ideal candidate, gone through a lengthy interview process, excitedly put together a job offer, expected a quick acceptance … and then you were rejected?

Of course you felt disappointed, and perhaps even embarrassed. When it comes unexpectedly, the rejection stings even more. But why does disappointment feel so bad? Neuroscience can explain why … and neuroscience also yields a few clues why your job offer might have been rejected.

It’s all about expectations.

In a recent column in the New York Times, Alina Tugend interviews David Rock, author of “Your Brain at Work.” It’s a fascinating read, but this quote really stands out:

“When we don’t hit our expectations, our brain doesn’t just get slightly unhappy, it sends out a message of danger or threat.”

Woah. When your expectations are not met, you actually feel threatened.

OK, well enough about you, now let’s talk about why your ideal candidate might have rejected you. If you are like most employers, you did not do a very good job of managing their expectations during that lengthy interview process. You left them hanging several times by not clearly communicating what your interview sequence would be, or how long things would take, or how many times they would need to come back for additional interviews. In my experience with hundreds of small to mid-size organizations, the normal interview process almost always fails to meet candidate expectations.  So your normal hiring process constantly puts your ideal candidate’s brain into danger and threat mode. No wonder they rejected your job offer.

Three years ago, one of my first blog posts was about managing candidate expectations during the interview sequence. Candidates assume that how you manage the hiring process is how you manage the organization. If employing top performers is important to you, candidates assume you’ll demonstrate it during the interview process.

Despicable Behavior

Some people love to tell stories of dumb things candidates do. Some people love to collect idiotic phrases from cover letters. Some people love to dwell on the details of why someone gave a terrible interview.

I detest that behavior.  Our candidates are people to be respected and served. Your candidates are potential employees, referral sources, customers, or donors.

The minute you allow petty story telling about the people you serve, you have stopped serving them and started down a slippery slope of condescension and arrogance.

I once worked in a staffing firm that had a policy of firing anyone who told a joke at the expense of a candidate. Zero tolerance. Fired on the first offense. If you want to improve your candidate experience and your hiring results, implement that policy first.

What’s Worth Reading

Clients always ask me for articles about their specific challenges, and in the past I would hunt through my old Twitter posts to find the best articles I’ve read and shared. But that was like throwing all my clothes on the floor of my room today, hoping to be able to find a clean shirt to wear next Thursday.

So over the past few months, I’ve “cleaned my room” to categorize the most useful and timeless articles I’ve read, where we can both read them any time. Here are links to the topics:

• Recruiting Advice for the Small to Mid-Size Organization
• Interviewing and Hiring Advice for Small to Mid-Size Organizations
• Leadership and Management Advice for Executives in Small to Mid-Size Organizations
• Maximizing your Productivity
• Perspective on the Washington Metropolitan Area Economy

My focus is on sharing what works, in this economy, for small to mid-size organizations.

I’m endlessly curious about how economic forces are reshaping our business environment. Fascinated by what makes change initiatives succeed or fail. Eager to learn what makes people engage and do good work. Over on The HR Examiner, I briefly summarized four books that have really changed my thinking about these topics. Although I’ve mentioned it before, no reading list is complete without including The Rare Find.

Happy reading!

What High Performing Organizations Do Differently

Imagine a problem has just occurred that will cause your company to lose $15,000 per month in revenue, and might soon cause a string of similar problems. Which solution to the problem would you choose?

Solution A) This solution has no upfront costs, but it diverts your internal resources away from their current work, takes 4 months to implement (costing $60,000 in revenue) and is projected to lose an additional $24,000 during year one, with the likelihood of continuing losses of $36,000 per year thereafter. This solution has a 50% chance of failing completely and if it does fail, it might trigger a cascade of similar problems.

Solution B) This solution has an upfront cost of $15,000 (which was not in your budget). It requires no diversion of internal resources, and takes 2 months to implement (2 months faster than Solution A). By the end of year one, Solution B will recoup the $30,000 revenue lost during its two month implementation, and is likely to generate an additional $36,000 in annual revenue thereafter. Solution B has a performance guarantee, and significantly reduces your risk of this problem cascading into other areas.

If Solution B seems like the obvious choice, let’s review what happened the last time a vital person with hard-to-find skills resigned from your firm.  Did you consider using a search firm to fill the job?  If so, did the conversation sound like this? “I hoped our HR department might be able to find someone to fill this job. We thought if we could handle the search internally, we might save money on search fees. And if HR failed, we could always hire a search firm later.” Or, perhaps your internal deliberations sounded like this? “We did not budget for any search fees, so we had to do it on our own.” Both conversations probably sound familiar, and on the surface they might even sound reasonable. But when you look carefully, you realize that that both conversations make the same four assumptions. They assume:

1. There is no cost to leaving a position vacant. There is zero cost to the lost productivity of both the employee and the team.
2. There is no risk to leaving a position vacant. Under-staffing and over-working the current team will not result in any turnover risk. Zero.
3. Any hiring process that results in a hire is just as good as any other. A hiring decision will be just as good whether you have only one candidate to consider, or a full slate of 6 qualified people.
4. Any person hired in this job will deliver equivalent results. There is no difference in productivity or performance between an “A player” and a “C player.” Zero difference.

So if all four assumptions are laughably wrong, how did you ignore them in your decision making? Research shows exactly why it happens. Recruiting costs are very easy to calculate, but it is far harder to calculate the cost of not hiring, and harder still to calculate the cost of hiring badly. When faced with that kind of complexity, busy executives look at what they do understand (recruiting costs), and ignore what they don’t understand (the cost of hiring slowly and badly). The snap decision becomes: “We can’t afford to pay a search fee.”

High performing organizations are different. Because they have specific performance targets to meet for every position, the cost of not hiring (or hiring badly) is far more obvious. So they have an easier time balancing their recruiting costs against the return on investment of making a good hire quickly.

This is exactly what our Solution A and Solution B example did for you above. With good information, the trade-offs were easy to make. It was the gathering of the information that was complex. (Which is precisely why so many people will skip the next section of this post and just read the conclusion).

It That Good Interviewing Advice or Just a Cheap Parlor Trick?

When you read advice about interviewing, it usually falls in one of these categories:

1) Self-serving studies where the study sponsored by pre-employment testing company X, shockingly, recommends you use pre-employment testing. Whatever… your eyes start to bleed in a few seconds and you can click away without much harm done.

2) An interview with a successful CEO where the journalist asks them their secret to hiring. As if you could take the hiring process used at a PR firm in New York and apply it to hiring forklift operators in Tulsa Oklahoma. While this sort of thing is amusing, it will not help make you a better interviewer. What works in one culture is irrelevant to another.

3) Thoroughly researched works that deal with the real-world complexity of hiring, and methodically track the results over time. A good example is  George Anders book, “The Rare Find.” Research this good is indeed a rare find. Read it, learn from it, wrestle with it–it’s worth it.

4) My real problem is category four. The stuff that sounds like science, and may even be decent science–but is not grounded in any kind of hiring process. People who have not rigorously worked on their hiring process gravitate to this stuff, like a “magic bean”–a panacea for all that ails their hiring process. But when you put it in practice, you find it’s just a parlor trick.  Here are a couple examples that people sent me this month:

One article says not to lean to the left when negotiating your salary. Pish posh. Interviewing is not a game of Twister. You’ll tie yourself in knots trying to pay attention to this stuff.

Watch the video below and you will think that giving someone a hot or cold beverage will influence your opinion of them (Hint: if you are interviewing, go for the hot beverage):

This stuff is ridiculous. If you want better hiring results, ignore the parlor tricks and focus your interview process on the factors that really do predict job performance.

Dealing with a Work Avalanche

Are you feeling overworked and understaffed right now? You’re not alone. Under-staffing is common during this stage of the business cycle. Some people think it is a long-term trend–calling it the “Job Squeeze.” Perhaps it is. I do know that work pressure has been building quietly for years in many organizations–like snow falling on mountaintops. And when something small triggers it, you are suddenly faced with a “work avalanche.”

Here is how work avalanches are created: When confidence is low, your organization responds to good news differently. You try to grow without corresponding staff growth. Headcount starts to trail revenue growth, and then falls further and further behind. Good news for the organization actually becomes bad news for the team. They were overworked before, and “good news” just makes it worse. Every new contract, new client, and new project just makes it harder to keep up.

How do you know you waited too long to add staff? Your best people are getting sick more often. You are seeing more preventable mistakes being made. Small issues cause tempers to flare, people are less tolerant of each other. They take things personally. Work just seems less fun. And eventually your best people burn out, give up, or quit–triggering an avalanche of work on the remaining team members.

Here’s the thing. Often, when you force your team to “do more with less” they are not doing more. They are making trades. They are trading long-term thinking for short term thinking. They trade planning time for reaction time. They stop making deposits into the relationship bank, and start making withdrawals–using up the goodwill they’ve built over many years. And the cost of that short term focus builds up… like snow building up on a mountain. Eventually the bill comes due in a work avalanche.

Here is what to do about it: When your hiring fails to keep pace with your growth, you can no longer afford to drag out the hiring process. But when confidence is low, that is exactly what happens. “Let’s try it first on our own, before we put it out to a search firm.”  Three months later the team is exhausted, frustrated, and at wit’s end. In your cautious desire to save money, you not only lost time and focus, you created even more risk–from people quitting.

Newsflash: When you are chronically understaffed, nobody on your team has the time or energy to do hiring on their own. When you are running from a work avalanche, you don’t want to make your backpack heavier.

If your business strategy requires you to keep staffing levels lean, you must be prepared to hire very quickly when you get good news. Either beef up your internal recruiting capabilities, have qualified contract workers on speed dial, or be ready to call in search firms the instant you know you need help.

Because standing still is not a good strategy when an avalanche  is bearing down on you.

Why Your January Hiring Plan will Work … in April

It’s mid-December. If you want to hire people in January, but you have not yet finalized your job description and recruiting strategy, you will probably succeed … in April.

It’s nothing personal, I’m confident that you are above average in every way. It’s just that most employers underestimate the importance of December planning and overestimate their ability to make things happen in early January. When they say  ”I plan to hire in January”  they really mean they will “finalize their plans for hiring” in January. Big difference. Finishing the planning in December means you can actually start recruiting on January second. ”Finalizing your plans for hiring in January” means that  you will post your ads (or start your recruiting) in late January. Then stack up some resumes and begin the interviews in late February, and then, by the time references are checked and notice is given, maybe your new hire will start work in April. And with a bit of luck, they should begin to be productive about the time your summer vacation rolls around.

I know. You are different. That kind of delay is not your intent. But I’ve seen it every year for the 25 years I’ve been in the search business, so yeah, I’m pretty confident that I’m right about this.

You see, December is a wonderful time of year…to put off work until January. You can hear the sweet, sweet lure of procrastination it in every work conversation. “We’ll get on that right after the holidays” and “Let’s set a meeting to tackle that in early January.”  Right now, it feels like you are just delaying by a week or two … it’s no big deal, right?

Except recruiting does not work that way. Not in January. January is different from every other month of the year in recruiting. It is the only month you can get a significant competitive advantage over everyone else. If you do your planning in December, and start recruiting aggressively on January 2nd, you can make your job offers before you have any serious competition from other firms. But when you miss that window, everything takes longer. And the only way to get the January advantage is by finalizing your recruiting plans in December.

Think about it: Your ideal future employees are just like your current employees. Busy, hardworking, stressed-out and looking for a break. And they will take break over the holidays. On a long drive they will reflect on what they want from their careers. Over eggnog they will make New Years Resolutions to go find it. And they will be primed, refreshed, and ready to be recruited in very early January.

But you won’t be recruiting in early January–you’ll be in meetings. Meetings to hammer out the dull job description with HR, waiting for your boss to sign off on the hiring requisition, checking in with some other department who wanted to “get with you” to review how their restructuring that might affect this position, and oh yeah, the CFO had a quick question about how this hire will fit in your budget.

So you’ll start recruiting in February, right when everyone else is recruiting. When recruiting takes longer because it is one of the most competitive recruiting months of the year. Hey good luck with that.

For want of a December meeting the job spec was not done.
For want of a job spec the recruiting was not done.
For want of recruiting the new hire was not found.
For want of a new hire your goals were not met.
For want of results your summer vacation was ruined.
And all for the want of a December meeting.

Sometimes Quitting is the Key to Recruiting Success

Yup, it’s true. Sometimes giving up quickly is the key to recruiting success.

Full disclosure, I’m a Viking, and it’s been (fairly) observed that “we have stubbornness issues.” So quitting does not come naturally to me, but it can be useful.

This week we had a recruiting strategy that generated some truly terrific candidates in the first few days. The problem was that the first twelve people we spoke to were above the salary target our client wanted to pay. So we killed that outreach strategy, revamped the target candidate profile and outreach messaging, and now we are talking to some less experienced people who are happy to work for the target salary. The first batch of expensive candidates fit our mental picture of what the client wanted. But the second batch will actually have a shot at getting the job.

In another search we had a recruiting strategy we thought was perfect. Except in the first three days, none of our target candidates were interested.  None. So we quit. We revamped the message on day three, since clearly we missed the target. Initially we were concerned that our outreach strategy would generate too many candidates. Boy we were wrong–we got less than a tenth of the response we expected.

Most recruiting strategies require patience and perseverance. You find good people one at a time. Some of the best candidates need to be “courted” over a long period of time and don’t respond to your recruiting message at first. They might take several contacts to become interested. Slow and steady recruiting is fine, so if good people are gradually responding to your approach, stick with it.

But when nobody responds to your recruiting strategy, or when everyone who responds to your outreach is not the right profile…then you need to quit and try something else. When nobody appropriate is responding, then you are just being stubborn to continue on the same path. Quit. Admit your brilliant strategy had “some room for improvement” and pivot to a new one.

So here is the real question.  How quickly do you admit it’s time to try a different approach? I suggest you admit it in the very first week, sometimes you can tell in 3 days. For example, if you are running a job ad, look at your ad response in the first three days. If there are not good people to talk to in that pool, your ad did not work. Really.

Waiting and hoping it will get better is not a useful recruiting strategy.

How to Recruit When the Hiring Manager has Champagne Tastes on a Beer Budget

I often hear recruiters complain about hiring managers with “unrealistic” expectations. I don’t hire those recruiters because I have no patience for that kind of complaining–it solves nothing. Recruiters are strategic advisors to, not victims of, the hiring manager. As recruiters our job is to advise managers of the cost of their choices, and their job is to decide how they would like to proceed. Whining and complaining has no place in that conversation.

When a hiring manager has really high standards there is often a business imperative for that need. Once we understand that need, their expectation suddenly seems reasonable. When a hiring manager insists on finding candidates with an uncommon set of attributes, their search will simply cost a bit more or take a bit longer. The manager’s request is not unreasonable–it is simply a trade-off. We tell the manager “This kind of skills can be found quickly and inexpensively, but that set of skills takes longer, costs more and is less predictable. Which approach would you prefer?”  The hiring manager simply has a choice. (Of course, it takes some market knowledge to be able to give this advice.)

Perhaps the most common recruiting trade-off is salary–the manager with “champagne tastes on a beer budget.” When they say “I need a superstar” but their salary budget is just average, or when they say “I want someone good” but their salary budget is below average … then what?

When it comes to salary trade-offs, I’ve learned that “showing” works far better than “telling.” When a manager’s expectations are not aligned with job market realities, I don’t spend much time telling them about salary surveys–it’s far more effective to show them candidates. They need to see what they get for their money. “Here is a superstar who is 20% above your target salary. And here is someone right within the target salary, but they lack this critical skill you wanted. And here is someone below the target salary, but you will need to invest a lot of your time to bring them up to speed.”  Even the most stubborn managers become reasonable when they can see candidates side-by-side. “Showing” gives them actionable information. Just talking about salary ranges never brings that level of clarity.

When a recruiter is complaining, it’s often because they allowed themselves to get boxed in to fighting against job market realities. Recruiters don’t define the job market–they navigate within it. If you consistently pay below the market rate, you’ll probably have high turnover. If you demand superstar performance levels, you’ll probably need to pay a premium rate. If you demand uncommon skills, your searches will require more time and effort. That’s just reality.

A recruiter’s job is to be the expert on job market realities. The hiring manager’s job is to drive business outcomes. When a recruiter defers to the hiring manager’s (often outdated) perception of the market, they cause the very problems that they later complain about.

For more on this topic, see:
Are you Hiring to Fit the Budget or Hiring to Fit the Job?

and

How Corporate Recruiting Budgets are Wasted

How to Interview for Career Patterns

One of the most interesting parts of interviewing for me is listening to the stories people tell about their career. Some people are always the victim of circumstance, but most often (in their own stories) they are the protagonist, and the boss or external events are the villain.

Sometimes the hero overcomes the obstacles, learns a lesson and reaches a new level of self-awareness. But sometimes the “hero” just quits to find a new job … and then proceeds to find a new job every 18 months after that.

Funny thing about 18 months.  That seems to be just about the time that people are really held accountable in executive roles. The new job honeymoon is over, problems can no longer be blamed on the predecessor, and all those easy breezy first year promises have come due. When people have 2 or 3 stints that are right around 18 months, I become very concerned.

So how do you begin to suss out the patterns in someone’s background?

At the beginning of every interview, I always ask candidates to walk me through their resume. Starting with college, I ask them to tell me what was best about each job and what was the worst aspect of each job. Good boss, bad company? Great experience but low pay? Great co-workers but no challenge? I just jot it down. I ask why they chose to leave and what they were looking for in the next job. Sometimes I have to ask a few times to pry loose the “bad” comments.

Then I look for the pattern in both the good and the bad. What answer is most frequent? Did they often just decide it was time for a change? Did they repeatedly get recruited by a former boss? Did they often leave just to get more money? Were their coworkers usually a bunch of losers? Did they make reference to “I did this” and” I did that” or make positive references to the team achieving something? Was the best thing the work itself, the clients, the challenge, or the people?

Everybody makes mistakes, most people take at least one bad job that they never should have taken, but did they own their part in the problem, or were they the victim of external forces? This is a powerful concept called “Locus of Control” and if you are not familiar with it, be sure to click the link to learn more.

After someone has walked through their resume like this for 20 minutes or so, I dive into all the behavioral interview questions specific to the job. (You do prepare interview questions in advance right?)

But I find that starting with this twenty minute review helps me quickly find the patterns in their answers. Then I just need to decide if those patterns fit the job… because tigers don’t change their stripes.

Is November a Good Time to be Recruiting?

We’re getting a lot of calls right now from potential new clients who have been recruiting on their own since the summertime. In past years, we got those calls in mid-September, then as the economy worsened, we got the calls in October. But this year, we’re getting them in November. It’s an economic barometer–I call it the “How long can you suffer until you ask for help?” indicator.

But in November, when people call, they often ask me a question. ”Is this a good time to be recruiting?” People are worried that they frittered away the great recruiting months of September and October.

Our ability to get the attention of great candidates varies depending on the time of year. (We can always find someone who is willing to talk with us.) So the real question is “How long will it take to put together a robust slate of highly qualified candidates?” And the holiday season adds some delays and complexities to that. It brings to mind a quote attributed to General Omar Bradley:

“Amateurs talk about strategy, dilettantes talk about tactics, and professionals talk about logistics”

So on to the logistics. On the 2011 calendar, there are 4 beautiful weeks of recruiting left–from November 14th to the 18th, and from November 28th through December 16th.  Outside of that, you will have a very difficult time attracting the attention of currently employed people.

So if you really want to get someone on board in early January, don’t dabble with just running ads and hoping for luck. This is the time to aggressively reach out, and to move quickly to interview anyone with potential. The recruiting window is closing fast.

But if something happens, and you end up frittering away the next few weeks, promise yourself that you will stop suffering this year. Make your plans in mid-December to be recruiting heavily in early January–which is the best time to recruit all year. At least then you can get someone started in mid-February.

The Key to Employee Retention is to Make Your People More Marketable

I’ve long said that the key to retaining great employees is to make them more marketable. Top performers always want jobs where they can make an impact, learn new skills, and raise their professional profile. What that opportunity is denied, they quit to go find it elsewhere. So if you want to keep great people, just accept the counter-intuitive wisdom of it, and keep making your people more marketable.

But Mike Figliuolo recently took that a step further. He argues that the best way for a manager to build a team full of top people is to not only make people more marketable, but to actively market them. He thinks your best recruitment strategy is to be a “net exporter of talent” and here is his logic:

Take a look at your team. Who are you clinging to when you should be letting them go? Who needs to move on so they can grow somewhere else? How are you helping them do that?

Export some talent. They’ll appreciate it and always be grateful. And once you start exporting, remember there are five people out there waiting to take the spot you just created. You then have a new crop of talent to grow and eventually export.

Cliches and Buzzwords in Your Job Descriptions

One of the hardest things I do every day is to turn dull job descriptions into clear, concrete, interesting descriptions of a job–something that a busy candidate can skim quickly and make a decision about. As in “Yup, that sounds like a job I’d love” or “Huh uh, that’s not for me.”

Clearly John Sumser agrees:

“Understanding how to write the right job ad for a particular job board is the most expensive part of online recruiting.”

One thing that makes it my writing more difficult is my love for reading. I devour business books magazines, and blogs every day–so I absorb 10 times the recommended daily allowance of buzzwords. If there were a 12-step program for management buzzwords, I’m sure my friends would have enrolled me by now. In fact, they would have staged an intervention.

That’s why this video hit home for me, I hope you enjoy it:

“The Rare Find” is a Must Read for Hiring Managers

If you want to lock in a long-term competitive advantage for your organization, be among the first to read and apply the lessons of George Anders new book “The Rare Find:  Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.”

Drawing on vivid examples from the U.S. Army Special Forces, Teach for America, Facebook, Hollywood, and professional sports, he shows how you can see what everyone else is missing in their hiring.

This is no vanity book. He’s not pitching his hiring system, or trying to sell you consulting services. Even better, he is not advocating that you “just do your hiring like we did at GE in the 1980′s.”

No, this book is the real deal.  Space does not permit me to cover all my favorite quotes, but here are a few:

“American social norms call for job candidates to tell a story of uninterrupted success. Previous experiences are burnished until they all sound like triumphs. Traditional resumes are set up so that resilience becomes invisible. That’s a horribly unfortunate distortion. At some point fate slams all of us to the ground. What happens next determines who we become. Some people are so bitter or dispirited they never fully recover. Others do whatever it takes to bounce back. The more you can learn about how people handle adversity, the more astutely you can judge them.”

or:

“…we’re in the midst of an enormous economic and technological upheaval that is redefining what it means to be enduringly successful. Long track records my be irrelevant or impossible to find in fields that are taking shape so fast the everyone is a newcomer. Competence is not enough anymore. The difference between growth and stagnation comes down to finding people with bold, fresh approaches, who can create opportunities that no one else saw before. That’s true not just in Silicon Valley, Hollywood or Wall Street; it’s the new norm in almost every field.”

From how to define what kind of person you are looking for, to how you should interview candidates, this book covers the landscape of talent spotting. I found no evidence of vague, sloppy platitudes or lazy thinking. For example:

“Take something as universal … as ‘work ethic.’ That’s a cherished value at almost any top tier organization (but) everyone’s definition of ‘work ethic’ calls for slightly different virtues. Some jobs call for people who can summon up extraordinary stamina and ingenuity in a crisis. Others require orderly souls who are totally comfortable with the tireless preparation for a challenge that may be months or years away. The work ethics of a great doctor and a great football player are not the same. Solving the talent puzzle means looking for exactly the right ethos that’s vital for a particular job–rather than trying to match candidates to a along list of universal virtues that might or might not be especially relevant.”