WorkPuzzle

Asking and Listening: The Magic Bullet of Interviewing and Hiring

I recently had the pleasure of visiting our long time clients at Prudential Carolinas, Prudential York Simpson Underwood, and Prudential Yost-Little Realty, all under the same roof in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I had spoken to this executive team and group of managers on at least two previous occasions and have always enjoyed our interactions. 

Part of my presentation involved a refresher course on the psychology of a good interview. Most of this section emphasizes the vital importance of listening to the candidate and eliciting as much information as possible during the first interview.  The process involves asking a lot of open-ended questions about who they are, what’s their story, what’s causing them to make a career change now, what they hope to gain from working, etc.

My emphasis on the power of listening comes from volumes of research on how people make decisions concerning any important topic in their lives. To emphasize this point I used several non-hiring examples such as dating or making an important purchase.

Think back to when you were dating—would you rather hear your dates drone on about themselves or ask some thoughtful questions along the way? When you buy a computer, do you want the tech-sales-geek to expound on all the details of each machine, or would you rather he ask a few questions first and then focus on your needs?

Here is a counter-intuitive principle that is true of all human interactions:  As people talk about themselves, they will learn more about themselves and feel more attached to you (the listener) in the process. 

No matter how many times I deliver this presentation, managers continue to report how difficult it is to put this into practice.  But, the group in North Carolina is starting to crack the code and seeing some incredible results.

During the presentation, one of the managers (Player Murray) gave the group some feedback on how this technique was working during his recent interviews.

"I'm not sure that I said much of anything in my last interview, and the candidate decided to come work for us!”

He went on to say that when he finally began to trust the process of first asking questions and listening, many interviews proceed with little need to describe much of what differentiates his company from others in the first interview.

"I am convinced that this is the number one principle to practice in the first meeting, and without it, I would not have hired many of the high quality candidates who came through HiringCenter.  They feel valued and connected when I listen to them first and foremost."

Player has learned the magic of asking and listening. He has seen first-hand how people become attached to those who are interested in them. He doesn't do this to be manipulative, he does it because it’s the right thing to do—that’s why it works. 

This story has been repeated with other managers across the country. Savvy, early-in-the- pipeline candidates who know little about the real estate industry will ask questions when they are ready. Even if they do ask some questions intially, don't be sucked into talking about yourself and your company too much.  Instead, answer briefly and get back to asking and listening.

In fact, here is a good rule of thumb:  Always assume you are not listening enough. At this point, you’ll probably be at the right level, and the magic will soon start happening in your interviews.

Question:  How have you learned to become a more effective listener (in interviews or other situations)? When using these techiques, how have you noticed your relationships change?    

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

How to Stop Wasting Time--Starting Right Now

I'm writing about this topic because I just started a new exercise designed to help me avoid wasting time. I started this exercise earlier today, so I can't tell if it works well long-term. But I can tell you that I’ve already pinpointed a couple of activities that I hope to permanently discard!

I didn't wake up this morning planning to do a time study. I simply felt frustrated when I realized that I had already wasted about two hours of my day. I didn’t mean to waste the time, but combining an unscheduled time slot with a lack of purpose and ‘time-wasting” sprouted like a weed.

I know that I must act purposefully for my time and effort to contribute to my long-term goals.  It’s frustrating to realize that I’ve fallen short of this objective. 

Fortunately I turned this frustration into some positive action and discovered an article that shed some light on this common struggle.   The article I found was written by Bruce Kasanoff and I immediately set out to follow its contents.  I think you’ll benefit from this as well.

A Highly Effective Way to Avoid Wasting Your Time

"Here's a simple way to potentially save hours of your time each week, by investing a total of about five minutes.

First thing in the morning, take a piece of paper and write a column of numbers representing each hour from the time you wake up until you go to sleep. For me, the list would start 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 1 and go all the way back to 12. (So far, you have invested about fifteen seconds.)

For this single day, at the top of every hour stop for 20 seconds and consider how happy you are with the way you spent your time. Did you invest it wisely? If the answer is yes, don't write anything.

But if you wouldn't repeat the way you spent the last hour, next to the number representing that hour write a few words that describes what you did. On one of my lists, for example, at 3 o’clock I wrote "pointless to talk with Ralph; doesn't listen," meaning that it was a waste of my time to meet with him.

Stick with this exercise all day; it takes very little time, just the discipline to stop every hour for a few seconds. But at the end of the day, you'll have a list of activities you wish you avoided. If the list has more than one or two items, you might want to continue the practice for a while.

If you make this a habit, you'll soon start to spot patterns. It will be easier to recognize ways in which you are wasting time and effort, and you'll do a better job of avoiding these.

You can also use this technique across an entire department to help all involved make better use of their time. To avoid offending people, I wouldn't suggest pooling the results. You can simply introduce the test and allow people to draw their own conclusions."

If you decide to implement this personally or within your office, be sure and let me know the results. And, I certainly hope that reading this WorkPuzzle edition won't turn up on your list of things to avoid! 

Question:  Have you developed any personal tactics for keeping "time-wasting" under control in your life? If so, let us know what you've learned.

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Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

"New to Real Estate" Candidate Sourcing Reaches New Highs

As many of you know, our company’s core business is helping our clients source high-quality candidates for difficult-to-fill positions.  While we assist companies in several different industries, much of our focus has been on the hiring difficulties real estate companies experienced over the last five years.

This has not been an easy task.  It is difficult to get talented individuals to consider changing careers during a recession and during the subsequent recovery.

Employment Stagnation

This may seem counter-intuitive, but pervasive high unemployment and lousy job prospects in the economy  create stagnation in sourcing and hiring for real estate companies. 

On the surface, you might surmise that if there is a large number of people who are unemployed (some of whom are talented individuals), a fair number of them might be willing to give real estate a try. Our sourcing data doesn’t support this hypothesis. 

In reality, most people who find themselves unemployed are not in a strong enough financial position to start a real estate career. Instead, they pursue the quickest path to a steady paycheck.

But, what about the people who are in low-paying, dead-end jobs?  Certainly, some of those individuals would be willing to look at the real estate industry as a way of “upgrading” their career…right?  Our sourcing data doesn’t support this hypothesis either. 

Many people who are underemployed are thankful just to have a job.  They don’t feel comfortable taking a risk that would put their current financial situation in jeopardy.  The proverbial “bird in the hand” is good enough for them.

What’s Changing?

So, what’s changing?  Why are candidate sourcing metrics starting to improve so dramatically in the last 3 months?  

I believe there are two reasons for this change.  First, the real estate market has improved in many areas of the country.  The national media has picked up on these changes and started to report positive news.  Candidates perceive this change and are now more open to considering real estate as a career option.

While positive reports help, most of the momentum is being created outside the real estate industry.   It is related to how average employees in non-real estate companies feel about voluntarily leaving their jobs.

The data for this theory is buried in the metrics that are tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was recently highlighted in an article written by Vivian Giang at Business Insider:

“People are voluntarily quitting their jobs at the highest rate since the pre-recession era, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey — known as JOLTS — published by The Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

The report says that 2.16 million people quit their jobs in the latest data, which represents 53 percent of all job separations — this includes quits, layoffs and discharges — when accounting for retirees. 

The graph below, published by Gluskin Sheff Research, illustrates the trend in the quitting rate and the number of people who have quit as a percentage compared to the total number of people employed in the past decade:

 

So what does this mean about our labor market? In short, it's an indication that people are confident that they can find other opportunities elsewhere and is a sign of sustained improvement in the labor markets…. This confidence happens when the economy grows fast enough…and people have [enough] faith in their own skills to make a living some other way rather than stay in a job they're not satisfied with.

So who are these workers? There's a good possibility that people are leaving their jobs to pursue freelancing, consulting or the entrepreneur route. This need to work for yourself is predicted to reach 40 percent of the American workforce by 2020, and is most common in sectors of the economy that are growing.”

As you can tell, much of what goes on in the labor market is out of our control.  When a positive trend happens (and in this case, two positive trends), it is important to take advantage of the rising tide. 

When engaging “new to real estate” candidates, now is not the time be on the sidelines.  Develop and deploy strategies for engaging the millions of individuals who are finally starting to feel less risk-averse about their careers.

Question: What strategies are you deploying to engage the 40% of the American workforce who lean towards working independently?

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Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Recruiting Performance Management ™ -- The Birth of the RPM

Can you remember the last time you experienced an”aha” moment? I'm happy to say that I've had quite a few of those lately, and I've come to learn that they seem to come in bunches. A few of  my realizations would probably bore you to death, but a couple around recruiting might just be up your alley. 

An individual I know, who is well-versed in the world of business consulting, was recently describing a major shift in company language around systems used to track and manage key performance indicators and metrics.

It was once in vogue to call these systems "dashboards". Dashboards included gauges, meters, interactive charts and virtually anything that needed to be monitored and improved. Six-sigma principles fit nicely into the idea of dashboards because it was much easier to design, measure, analyze, verify and improve processes. 

Apparently someone, I'm not sure who, came up with the bright idea to rename these dashboards to describe what they truly aim to do. So, instead of ”dashboards” they became ...."Enterprise Performance Management" or EPM's for short. When you think about it, the idea wasn't all that novel--Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have been named appropriately for quite some time. 

So, during this conversation, an obvious close-to-home parallel came to mind. Why not re-name our HiringCenter dashboard "Recruiting Performance Management" system? Or RPM for short? After all, the whole idea of a name is to describe what it does. And, for most of you who execute the RPM as designed, it works.

Here is the interesting part. We have observed, since our inception in late 2004, an interesting “black hole” in real estate industry.  Despite "recruiting" being one of the most important goals of almost every company, it seemed to be the only area where performance systems were rarely developed and practiced.

There are multiple reasons for this fact. One reason, which we learned through the early days of our development, was that it is extremely complicated and time consuming to invent a system to source, build, track and hire a pipeline of quality people. We fortunately learned that it could be done and, if executed properly, can be measured and improved. 

What I love about our clients is that they are usually the companies dedicated to developing, analyzing, and improving systems and were first in line when we went through (and continue) the development of such a system for recruiting. In the words of one of our clients:

"Yes, it can be time consuming…but if we weren’t doing this, how would we have added new people consistently?  And since every broker understands that recruiting is the lifeblood of a growing real estate company…it is certainly not something to be left to chance.  The [Recruiting Performance Management] system" takes away most of the uncertainty."

Question:  Does your company treat recruiting as a critial business system?  If so, what systems have you developed to measure its performance?

The name Recruiting Performance Management™ and Recruiting Performance Management (RPM)™ are trademarks of Tidemark, Inc.

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Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Attracting New Agents: What do Working Parents Want in a Job?

Over the past year, I've written frequently about the need for the real estate industry to hire young, tech-savvy new agents to replace the aging workforce.  

In many one-on-one discussions with owners and managers, the aging demographic of their agents is quickly becoming the “elephant in the room.” If it is not addressed within the next five years, attrition rates will rise to an unsustainable level for many companies.

There is only one way to ultimately solve this problem—recruit “new to real estate” agents from outside the industry.  While it may be tempting to think hiring from competitors can solve the demographic problems, they have older agents too!  In most markets, there are simply not enough experienced young agents to make that strategy viable.

The companies that become proficient in attracting a constant flow of talented “new to real estate” agents to their organizations will have a distinct competitive advantage in the years ahead.

How do you become proficient at this task?  That’s a complex question we’ve sought to answer in WorkPuzzle over the past several years.   If you’re a new WorkPuzzle reader, you may have some catch-up to do.   Each piece to the puzzle adds new understanding to the realities of hiring.

I discovered another new piece to the puzzle last week that I thought you might find interesting.  It comes from a study recently competed by the Pew Research Center on the nature of modern parenthood. 

The study addressed many different aspects of parenthood, but the most relevant part was how young parents (ie. parents with children under 18 living in the household) interact with work.  More specifically, what is it that working moms and dads find most important in a job:

 

Many of the young, talented candidates who have the capacity to become high-performing agents in your organization will be young parents.   It only makes sense that you understand their priorities when considering a new job.

If you’re interviewing a candidate that’s a parent (by the way, it is technically illegal to directly ask a candidate about their family status, but most candidates will volunteer this information during the interview) be cognizant of these issues.

During the investigative part of the interview, be ready to ask open-ended questions around the topics that are most important to them, such as:

“Do you feel like you’re current job (or previous job) is secure?  Does that bother you?”

“Are you currently in a job that you enjoy?”  What parts of your current job do you find most irritating?”

“Is there flexibility in your current job?  If you had more flexibility in your job, how would your life change?”

By asking questions about these topics, you’ll uncover the unique pain the candidate is experiencing.  Until the candidate feels you understand their unique situation, he/she will not be open to listening to the possible solutions becoming a real estate agent may offer.

Also, notice that spending a lot of time on compensation issues has a low chance of impacting the candidate—especially if the candidate is female.  Don't avoid compensation issues to the point of being awkward, but steer the conversation back the issues that matter.

Finally, a real estate career has the capability of answering the needs that many young parents care about most.  Once you uncover the pain in a candidate’s previous job/career, be ready to articulate how working your organization can provide compelling alternatives to the status quo.

Question:  Would you rather hire a "new to real estate" agent who is already a parent, or hire someone who is not yet at this stage of life? 

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Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Meaning at Work: How to Tap a New Level of Performance in Your Agents and Employees

Dr. Robert Emmons, a prolific researcher and professor at the University of California, recently wrote:

“As far as we know, humans are the only meaning-seeking species on the planet. ‘Meaning- making’ is an activity that is distinctively human, a function of how the human brain is organized. 

The many ways in which humans conceptualize, create, and search for meaning has become a recent focus of behavioral science on the quality of life and subjective well-being.” 

A tremendous amount of research and writing on the connection between human performance and the meaning people find in their work has started to emerge because of this focus.   And, some of the heavy-hitters in the business world were quick to take notice of these discoveries. 

Here are some examples of how much attention is being paid to “meaning-making” at work:

• Research at McKinsey and Company has led to actionable strategies and tasks that help infuse meaning in the work of individuals and organizations.  These findings were based on research done by social scientists. Their full perspective and recommendations can be found in Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage
• Gary Hamel, ranked by the Wall Street Journal as the world’s most influential business thinker, and who Fortune magazine called “the world’s leading expert on business strategy" is encouraging managers to see themselves as “entrepreneurs of meaning.”
• One of my favorite psychological researchers, Mikel Csìkszentmihàlyi, writes extensively about “the making of meaning” in his book Good Business.

I want to emphasize that the research being done in this area is far from the touchy-feely anecdotes or inspirational speaker clichés that sometimes sound similar. I have little tolerance for methods and insights that are not based on research.   Once you push through the surface language, there is substance behind this topic that leads to real and measurable performance improvements.

There is far too much to share with you about this subject matter in one blog edition, but here are a few examples that will get you thinking about the importance of meaning at work.  These examples were compiled by Susie Cranston and Scott Keeler at McKinsey and Company:

1.  Emerson Electric

"David Farr, chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric.... is known for asking virtually everyone he encounters in the organization four questions:

(a) How do you make a difference? (testing for alignment with the company’s direction)

(b) What improvement idea are you working on? (emphasizing continuous improvement)

(c) When did you last get coaching from your boss? (emphasizing the importance of people development)

(d) Who is the enemy? (emphasizing the importance of 'One Emerson' and no silos, as well as directing the staff’s energy toward the external threat).

The motivational effect of this approach has been widely noted by Emerson employees."

2.  Wells Fargo

"The CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, marked the first anniversary of its change program by sending out personal thank-you notes to all the employees who had been involved, with specific messages related to the impact of their individual work."

3.  PepsiCo

"Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, sends the spouses of her top team handwritten thank-you letters. After seeing the impact of her own success on her mother during a visit to India, she began sending letters to the parents of her top team, too.

Some managers might dismiss these as token gestures—but employees often tell us that the resulting boost in motivation and in connection to the leader and the company can last for months if not years.

As Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Stores, put it, 'Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free—and worth a fortune.'”

Don't get me wrong, working hard and expecting everyone else match your level of effort can be a powerful motivator. However, that philosophy has limitations.

As human beings, we need more.  Science is telling us that the “more” we’re looking for is meaning in our work.  Make sure your agents and employees understand and buy-into the meaning behind their tasks.  If they don’t, they’ll not reach their maximum potential and your team will suffer.

Question:  How do you help infuse your organization with meaning?   What communication techniques have you tried and found effective?

 

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Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.