How to master recruiting | Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen | TEDxWarwick

[Music] [Applause] [Music] what a fantastic introduction thank you very much so over the next 15 minutes I'm going to talk exactly about what we said before which is I'm gonna talk about one of the most important things for any leader to be good at actually gonna argue it's the most important thing for any leader and CEO to be good at the interesting thing with this particular subject is that nobody teaches as anything about it it's actually really hard to find any books on the topic it's really hard to find a university course on the topic

it's really hard to actually find any TED talk on the topic but before I tell you about what I'm gonna talk about I'm going to talk about a guy called Benjamin sander now Benjamin sander is the conductor for the Boston Philharmonic Alec Esther now the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra if you don't know it is one of the best orchestras in the world now Ben is one day standing on stage on his podium conducting his orchestra of about a hundred people and he's realizing at that point in time that out of the hundred people in the orchestra

Ben is the only person who doesn't have a sound and is the only person who doesn't have a sound does that mean you can't hear Ben no of course not of course you can hear him you can hear him how he delivers through other people you can hear him through how he's selected people to be in his orchestra now many people have very advanced ideas of a leadership it but I think Ben nails it pretty damn well in that sentence there really for us leadership and our very simplistic way comes down to two things it's

about setting the right team setting the best team that you can for your company your organization whatever part of your life it is and this is about helping those people to achieve the results that is going to make them successful in that particular role that's it now I was introduced before and very often I am introduced as an entrepreneur or I'm introduced as a CEO and the reason for that is I've been part and lucky enough to co-found over 20 companies with absolutely amazing people people who are extremely smart and who I will make success

to but really I don't consider myself a CEO I don't consider myself an entrepreneur I consider myself a recruiter that's it my job and my role is to find the right people if I find the right people and I select the right people my job is really really simple if I don't select the right people my life is very complicated now we all know this when we have a great team and we've selected the right people for our team our life looks something like this maybe not quite something like it but the fact is we're

not creative selecting people and it's they're very very good reasons for it there are no subjects in university as I mentioned earlier on the topic when we become a leader in an organization our boss doesn't take us aside and says Mass now I'm going to teach you the secret of how you select the right people for your team we just assume that people are going to be great at selecting people for our team so we just say look congratulations master you're now the manager of this and this restaurant of this in this part of the

company go and build a team great thank you very much now when we get it wrong we know the cost US Department of Labor said the cost for any particular bad hire for any role is 30% McKenzie took it one step further and said the difference between average performance top perform in a position 67% productivity and bottom-line profits but it's not just these numbers that it impacts we know what else had impacts it impacts culture when you hire the wrong person we select the wrong person for a team the culture goes down the drain you

know what it also impacts it impacts your happiness and I got the wrong person you go stress to work every day because you have to deal with a person you don't want to deal with it also makes their life miserable if you select the wrong person for a job you're not just doing yourself at this favor you're doing them at this favor as well it limits your growth it limits a bunch of different things for you there's a good old saying that says people spend ten percent of their time recruiting 90% of her time make

enough for recruiting mistakes anyone laughing in here is probably a leader who's faced this as well and it comes back to the part of being if you hire the right people your job is actually really really easy now I gotta tell you we are horrible it's we're getting better but if you're horrible it's because nobody taught me how to recruit so I had to go out and figure it out for myself one of my CEOs who had newly elected for one of our companies as a CEO you know I figured out I'd failed through practically

training him on recruiting and I went to him and I said to him look you're coming to ask me questions about marketing you're coming to ask me questions about Finance you come to ask me questions about sales but never once have you asked me a question about recruiting why is that that was exactly I was met by complete silence and a very red face the face of somebody very embarrassed so we have to be proactive about seeking this information that we can improve our efforts now the good thing is we're not alone in being horrible

at recruiting the UK billionaire John Caldwell once said that if I'm lucky I only get recruiting wrong 70% of the time now knowing that we're bad at this we set out as a team we wanted to build a framework that allows us to be much better recruiting I think we have a slight issue there we go thank you we set out to build a framework that would make us much better at recruiting a structured process that we believe can be one of the best recruiting structured process and frameworks in the world now I should say

before I do this we're really bad at recruiting if you look at the talents that I have in some of the tests that we use the ability to understand people falls the lowest of all my talents so I'm really doesn't come natural for me the second thing I should tell you is we probably understand 20% of what we need to understand we probably leverage only 10% of that because of things like arrogance because of our cognitive biases because we still think that we can do things on on our backbone and just computer whether person is

right for the role like this now all these cognitive biases there are many of them but let me walk you through some of them so the first thing is to be trying to hire our hire ourselves why not we're excellent we're the best employee there is and we know how it is look I'm analytical he has to she has to be analytical I am empathetic the person has to be empathetic I am competitive everyone should be competitive so we look for ourselves the second issue is we try to hire people who can do everything I

spoke to one of our CEOs the other day and he was trying to hire a CMO he wanted to see him oh came from a PR company true story when a CMO come from a PR company who is analytical detail are not good at sales good at building relationship in strategic easy to find that person right so we try to find a person who could do every single part of the entire company because then we feel like we're gonna be successful but the truth is selecting the right people is a bit like a football team

you don't want a person who's good at everything you want the best attacker and you want the best goalkeeper and you want the best defender we also like to hire people who are worse than ourselves there's good old saying that says ace hire bees be higher CC Hyades and so on and so forth I try to tell our leaders all the time to say look I don't care if you're the smartest person in the room because ultimately what's gonna tell me that you're the smartest person is that you hire people who are smarter and better

than yourself you don't actually as a CEO or as a leader need to be the smartest person you don't even need to know more of about the subject and the people work for you as long as you can find and select the right people we also make quick decisions we go into an interview and we know how this works we go into an interview in about a couple of minutes maybe sometimes seconds we've decided I like the guy I don't like the guy and next 45 50 and our minutes we end up spending all the

time and all of our energy just to confirm that we're right we know that it's a bit of the facebook error today where we love to look for stories that confirm the bias that we already have and the last thing of many is the Whedon do not hire and oh sorry we hire for single positions not for teams we're trying to build a team we don't need 15 strikers we don't need 15 golden keepers we need to put people together in a team because we know that we have these biases and because we know we

make these mistakes all the time we wanted to make it much more structured we wanted to do something that's almost like an Ono thing to say which is we built an algorithm to predict whether a person is going to be right for the role yes or no that is we build a mathematical formula and algorithm the runs on a computer that's going to predict if your apply for a job with us if you're going to be successful yes or no now before you think that Darren's think well as is such an idiot while you know

how can he treat people this way how can you put people into algorithms I want to say that what we're doing is really we're doing what we're doing up here already which is we are trying to compute whether or not this person is right for this particular role that's really what's happening when we were sitting across from someone and interviewing them and asking questions we look what we're trying to just gauge is this person going to be successful in this job in fact if you want one hidden really what we're trying to figure out is

we're trying to figure out if this person is going to be able to create the outcome that we want the person to create so we built an algorithm which is we basically built a scorecard of all the different things that are important and we build an algorithm then calculates a percentage chance of that person to be successful in that particular role now the algorithm isn't perfect yet it's just a supporting tool right now but what the algorithm forces us to do is as it forces us to be conscious about what goes on up here it

forces us to think about the decisions that we're making the trade-offs that we're making and by putting on a piece of paper we've already altered significantly the way that we do things now all the things the algorithm today I'll let by people so there are still a bunch of biases and a bunch of things that we do wrong because all the input comes from us whether it's from us direct to your tools that we use it comes from people ultimately so it's just a computing of score that it does today one of the reasons why

we like this approach is because besides selecting the right people we have another thing that we're very passionate about and that is giving every candidate every person out there a fair chance at a job you see in high school I was horrible I was absolutely horrible I went to the principal's office multiple times the fact that I even got through high school I still don't understand I was fired from McDonald's and that takes a lot I agree it didn't quite buy my reason that my cat fell out the window as a reason for not showing

up to work one day which happens to be true but you know there probably other reasons for firing me as well but the truth is some of us mature later for our careers some of us need the right position the right motivation the right leadership to be excellent now the problem is today everybody is screened on their resume if you don't have the right mess in May you're out the door now that limits the world that limits the candidates that we're able to find and attract that means we cannot find the diamond in the rough

and we love finding diamonds in the rough that's why we're entrepreneurs that's why have you build companies by having tools available to us that allows us to look beyond resumes beyond the obvious we are able to find what we call whispering talents now let me explain what a whispering telling this first of all you have the shouting talent a shouting talent to give you an example as somebody who went to war University they got chopped grades they went to great investment bank in the city they got promoted faster than anyone else that's a shouting Talent

now anyone can spot a shouting talent because you just look at their resume you know how they look we like to find whispering talents whispering talents are just as good as shouting talents other people just don't know it it's not as easy to see have an algorithm and tools allows us to open up our candidacy flow to everyone out there it allows anyone with any resume off the streets with the university without a university degree to come and join our company now we may pretend like we have certain barriers on the outside but actually we

look at every single candidate who comes in very thoroughly through the tools that we have available to us now when you're looking at hiring somebody you're trying to determine three different questions ultimate you're trying to find out if they can deliver the outcome but that really goes into three different buckets its will to person be able to do the job will they be successful if they deliver the outcome that you want them to deliver number one it's very important the second thing is will the fit your culture will they be able to fit in the

culture you've created that is key for us that is binary if you don't fit our culture doesn't matter how good you are you're not gonna be part of our job company but if you do fit our culture then you're able and you're able to deliver the outcome then it comes down to you do we fit your life and it's important that you fit the candidates life as well are you going to be part of their lives for a long time or a short time do you fit into their family situation what they want and what

they want for their career now if you want to go through an interviewing process very structurally we find that there are three things that you have to be good at the first thing is you have to be a didn't able to identify the correct needs that is you have to find out what is it that you have to be good at in this particular position to be successful now need identification is where most people go wrong if I had to say from this entire talk what is the number one thing you should improve on it's

identifying the correct needs for the particular position and be careful like I said earlier that you don't try to say the person should be good at everything the second thing is you want to have the right questions and the right tools to be able to figure out the data for those needs is the person able to answer how do you answer the questions the person fits those particular needs that you have for role now a need could be you want somebody who's good at building relationships for example then the question becomes what questions what tools

can I use to figure that out by the way it could be cases and other things and then you want to have the right interpretation of the information somebody comes to the door and sells you sells you look here's the candidate the candy that got top grades at work but they never were part of arranging a TED conference anything like that does that person have dry but does that person not have drive is an interpretation question and interpreting that correct it becomes very important and oftentimes where people go wrong now the way for us to

figure this out in particular identify the needs is we want to think about it as if we asked a Formula One team about their car now imagine you ask the Formula One see about the car they would say look a car this consists of chassis wheels suspension within the wheels they're different subcategories of robbers that you can have and you would say to them well how do you choose your robber well it depends on the condition it pens on the road it depends on how you want to drive and how your car is set up

while interviewing is similar when you look for someone in Canada said look I want this candidates who have empathy you need to understand the trade-offs you're making what are the things that are good about having empathy we also we like people them but the problem can also be it's hard sometimes to make decisions because you understand why people have it tough and you understand their situation so you have to understand the trade-off between those different things now for us we found out that we believe by talking to executive search firms we talk to human analytics

firms we talk to psychologists that a person on a very high level consists of three different things they consist of a brain which is an IQ which is your ability to learn and comprehend information leverage that information the second thing they consist of in a work situation is their heart which is their personality and their talents and the third thing is their toolbox which is the past experiences this is what you usually see a resume that's their education the things they've learned the functional learnings exam now most companies and most people in they recruit they

start out with the functional learnings they start about what the person has done before we start with the heart before we've identified we want the person to have studied this or studied that or have this background we say who do we look for as a person because we're huge believers in higher Fitzalan train for skilled methodology which is we hire the best person and we help them to get the tools because we believe they can they can find the tools of the right person to be successful at this the second thing we look at is

do they have the IQ to a comprehend and understand and leverage information and then the third thing is we look at our resume that's true for probably 95% of the position that we look for of course if you want somebody to build this roof they better have the right skills it's not enough to have enough motivation and then we try to look at the ways to test that now I should say that there are a lot of ways you can test people most people do through interview questions you can give them cases you can ask

them to do presentations you can use assessment tools that exist out there but really what you're trying to find out is can the person do the job so the best thing you can do is actually to take the person and have them work at the particular job for a couple of days and you'll be surprised that I found CTOs CEOs CFOs and CEOs come to our office and actually conduct a job for everything for between two one day to a week no matter how senior they are that's the best way for them to get a

feel for the company and the best way for you to get a feel for the company so figure out how you're going to test the things that are important for you and then the last thing you have to do is to go back and look at the information so when you hire someone keep your notes write down your notes keep them and then look at them three to six months later and say was I right or was I wrong most people just say I hired wrong okay let me try again very few people go and

say what did I interpret wrong did I ask the wrong questions did I use the wrong tools to get that information so keep the notes and whether you're successful in hiring or not go back and have a look at it and if you do all those things right and you apply your own Drakkar to this and you don't have to build an elder in you can do it your way then you're going to be better and better and better at improving your ability to select the right people and ultimately you can get to the part

where you will spend 10% of your time recruiting 90% of your time building new companies or whatever you like to do thank you very much [Applause] [Music] you