Hire Great People Fast

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http://www.fastcompany.com/29104/hire-great-people-fast

Hire Great People Fast

By Bill Birchard

August 31, 1997

Lessons from Netscape, Cisco, and Yahoo! on how to find the right people and

get them up to speed -- fast.

It's the toughest -- and most important -- challenge in business today. Lessonsfrom Netscape, Cisco, and Yahoo! on how to find the right people and getthem up to speed -- fast.

Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape Communications, is standing before 50 newrecruits at an orientation session. He's a congenial guy with a wry sense ofhumor. He's old enough to be the father of many people in the room, which isprecisely what he doesn't want to be.

First he asks a question: "What's the purpose of this business?

"To make money," replies one new employee.

"Wrong!" Barksdale snaps. "Our purpose is to create and keep customers.Somehow each of you has to be a part of that purpose."

Next he sets goals: Netscape wants to land 200 new corporate accounts bythe end of the quarter, to deliver its software on time all the time, and todouble revenues every year.

Then he does some attitude adjustment: "We are not a family at Netscape,"he insists. "That would put a lot of pressure on me. It would mean I'm thedad." Think of Netscape as a basketball team, he suggests, opportunistic onoffense, tenacious on defense. "Then I can be the coach."

The coach runs through a set of hand signals, the last one being fists punchedskyward. Then he leads a group cheer: "NETSCAPE! EVERYWHERE! TEAM!FIGHT!"

What's happening today on the Netscape campus in Mountain View,California happens every day in fast-growing companies around the country.The scarcest commodity in business is not customers or technology capital.It's people. More and more companies simply can't recruit great people fastenough. This talent shortage is their biggest obstacle to growth; solving it istheir biggest strategic priority.

Barksdale's company focuses relentlessly on acquiring talent. Netscape hasdistributed more product (at last count, 60 million copies of its Web browser)


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and generated more revenue than any software startup in history. Whichmeans it has to keep adding people at a ferocious pace. Netscape wasfounded in February 1994 with 2 employees. A year later it had 350employees. It now has more than 2,000 employees. Margie Mader, who runsrecruiting and staffing, is clear: "Hiring is a strategic initiative here. Every

person is involved in the process."

Netscape is not alone. Cisco Systems, the fast-growing network-equipmentmanufacturer based in San Jose, California hires as many as 1,200 peopleevery three months -- but still has hundreds of open slots. All told, there are18,000 unfilled positions in Silicon Valley today. High-tech companies inAustin, Texas expect to add 15,000 people this year. Last year Boeing hired amind-boggling 20,000 employees, sometimes as many as 500 people in asingle week.

Call it power staffing. If you want to keep growing you have to keep hiring. Thereal challenge isn't finding people. It's finding the right people and turningthem into topflight contributors -- fast. First there's recruiting. Most greatpeople already have great jobs. Why should they work for you? Then there'sselection. How do you pick the right people without compromising yourstandards? And don't forget the learning curve. What good is adding newmembers to your team if they don't know how you play the game?

A handful of fast-growing companies, including well-known innovators like

Netscape, Cisco, and Yahoo!, are as rigorous about sourcing, selecting, andshaping new people as they are about designing new products andconquering new markets. Their experiences, and the tools they've developedto keep moving faster, can help you create your own techniques for powerstaffing.

Build the Buzz

first the bad news: fast-growing companies are chronically short of talent. Nowthe good news: fast-growing companies are in a unique position to attract the

most and the best candidates -- if they leverage their success to build a buzz.Put simply, the best way to find great people is to encourage them to find you.

Consider Netscape. Sure, the company is adding people at a fever pitch. Buteven more people have Netscape fever. The company receives as many as6,000 rsums and interviews as many as 700 candidates per month. (That's60 rsums for every person hired.) At Netscape the demand for talentcreates its own supply.

This wave of interest is no accident. From the beginning, says CEO

Barksdale, the company's basic recruiting strategy was "to get known." Thatis, to become the kind of place where great people want to work. That's easierfor some companies than for others. Netscape is more than just a fast-


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growing software outfit. It's a cultural icon, the flagship company of the Web.Netscape recruiters are full of stories about people going to extraordinarylengths to get their attention. One hopeful wrapped his rsum around apackage of cookies. Another arrived for his interview on a skateboard.

Not every company sits at the intersection of serious business and popcelebrity. But that doesn't mean they can't become talent magnets. Cisco is acase in point. The company is a competitive juggernaut, with revenues ofmore than $4 billion and a market value of more than $40 billion. But there'sno chance that Cisco will ever capture the popular imagination the wayNetscape has. So it uses guerrilla techniques to raise its profile. Cisco's build-the-buzz strategy centers on the primary market for its products: the Internetitself.

The company's Web site (http://www.cisco.com/jobs) has become aturbocharged recruiting tool. Looking for a job at Cisco? Search by keyword tomatch your skills with openings. You can also file a rsum or create oneonline using Cisco's rsum builder. Most important, the site will pair you upwith a volunteer "friend" inside the company. Your new friend will teach youabout Cisco, introduce you to the right people, and lead you through the hiringprocess.

But the real power of Cisco's Web site is not that it helps active job-seekersmove more quickly. It's that it sells the company to people who are so happy

in their current jobs that they've never thought about working at Cisco. "Weactively target the passive job seeker," says Michael McNeal, director ofcorporate employment.

That's why the company advertises the site in places where its kind of peoplehang out. Cisco has linked to the Dilbert Web page (www. dilbert.com), thedarling of disenfranchised programmers. Last winter, right before the SuperBowl between the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots, Ciscoadvertised on Boston's leading electronic city guide (www.boston.com). Thesite was registering 2.5 million hits per day, many from engineers and Net-

savvy managers from Route 128. Cisco also buys space on sites likeTravelQuest (www.travelquest.com), the reservation service. Software letsCisco read the URLs of Web surfers, match them to outfits it likes to recruitfrom (such as competitors 3Com and Bay Networks), and then, and only then,paint a banner with a link to the company's jobs page.

Thanks to these and other savvy tactics, Cisco's jobs page records as manyas 500,000 accesses per month. Cisco generates a stream of reports aboutwho is visiting the site and fine-tunes its strategy accordingly. For example thecompany knows that most hits come from the Pacific time zone between 10a.m. and 2 p.m. The conclusion? Lots of people are trolling for jobs oncompany time, always a nerve-racking pursuit. So Cisco is developing


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software to make life easier for stealthy job-seekers. It lets users click on pull-down menus, answer questions, and profile themselves in just 10 minutes. Iteven covers their backsides. If the boss walks by, users can hit a key that willactivate a screen disguise -- changing it to "Gift List for Boss and Workmates"or "Seven Successful Habits of a Great Employee."

Never Settle for Less

You're desperate to fill that slot in marketing. you're losing business. Youfinally have a decent candidate. He's not exactly what you're looking for, butsomebody beats nobody, right? Wrong. A cardinal rule of power staffing isthat you should never hire people you wouldn't hire if the people shortageweren't so severe.

Hiring fast doesn't mean you have to lower your standards. And refusing to

settle doesn't mean you have to slow to a crawl. The secret is to decide upfront the kinds of people you want to hire, identify mismatches quickly, andthen develop techniques to evaluate the remaining candidates for the traitsyou need.

EMC, the red-hot manufacturer of enterprise storage products based inHopkinton, Massachusetts, uses just this approach. Four years ago, when itwas still a relatively manageable 700 people, the company realized thatdemand for its products was taking off. It was about to go on a growth (and

hiring) tear. But top management wondered how the company could addliterally thousands of new people without losing its identity -- the culturalattributes that had made it such a success in the first place.

So a team of senior executives and HR specialists began to brainstorm: Whatcharacterized great EMC employees? Those sessions led to the EMC"Employee Success Profile," a detailed definition of who makes it at EMC. It isbuilt around seven categories: technical competence, goal-orientation, asense of urgency, accountability, external and internal customerresponsiveness, cross-functional behavior, and integrity. "We've held fast to

those attributes as the core nuggets" of hiring, says John Ganley, EMC'sdirector of corporate staffing. That's why, he argues, EMC is still much thesame company it was four years ago, even though it now has 5,100employees.

Yahoo!, the Internet search firm in Santa Clara, California, is also in themiddle of a growth tear. Incorporated in April 1995 by two Stanford Universitygraduate students, Yahoo! went public one year later. Users view an averageof 30 million pages per day, up from just 4 million in 1995.

No company can grow this fast without adding gobs of people. At the time ofits IPO Yahoo! had 65 employees. It now has three times as many, with anaverage of 50 open slots at any time. Little wonder that senior managers


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spend 30% of their time finding, hiring, and keeping the "right" people. Butwho are the right people?

Jeff Mallett, Yahoo!'s senior vice president of business operations, says thecompany has identified the core attributes behind great Yahoo! people. He

says the company will simply not add new people unless they make the gradeon these four factors:

People Skills: "We assume that in a short period of time, any person we hirewill be responsible for managing other people," Mallett says. "So we alwayslook for good interpersonal skills."

Spheres of Influence: "The people we hire should have their own shortlists ofgreat talent," Mallett says "Our own people's 'little black books' are our bestform of recruiting."

Zoom in, Zoom out: "We need people who can get so tactical it hurts,"Mallett says, "who can do the blocking and tackling to make a project happen.That's 'zooming in.' But these same people also have to 'zoom out,' to look atthe big picture: How is this project going to affect the competitive landscape?

Passion for Life: "We want people who are passionate about their subjectareas," Mallett says. "And it turns out that most people who have a passion forsomething specific -- sports, arts and culture -- also have a passion for life. It's

not just about doing great things for the company, but also great things in life."You don't have to be high-tech to be highly selective about the people youhire, or to devise highly refined techniques to evaluate candidates quickly.Five years ago, Christopher Shipp, director of training and development atPrudential Securities, spent nine months figuring out what kind of peoplemade great financial advisers. He researched the company's 800 topperformers and identified a dozen measurable criteria.

For the last three years, Prudential has used these 12 criteria to hire new

financial advisers, including 1,000 people last year alone. Candidates take awritten test for experience, endure a battery of structured interviews, write afinancial plan, and visit Prudential up to four times. Roughly 10 candidatesapply for every person hired. The investment per hire? Between $60,000 and$100,000, Shipp estimates, including evaluation expenses, first-year training,and draws against commission. "There are no shortcuts," he says.

But there can be big payoffs. By 1996, after three years on the job, the firstclass of advisers hired according to the 12 criteria had generated an averageof $14.5 million of client assets each -- comfortably above the company's

best-case scenarios.

Get a Fast Start


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it's hard for fast-growing companies to generate a pool of candidates bigenough to satisfy their voracious appetites for talent. It's harder still to selectthe right people quickly. But there's one more challenge: to turn helplessnewbies into productive contributors. Call the process what you will --orientation, indoctrination, basic training -- it's a critical element of power

staffing.

Beau Parnell, Cisco's director of human resource development, calls a newemployee's first day "the most important eight hours in the world." Hispersonal mission, he says, is to help Cisco achieve "the fastest time toproductivity for new hires in the industry."

That requires work -- and technology. Last year, employee surveys at Ciscoshowed that some new hires felt like lost baggage rather than the company'smost precious asset. Their phones didn't work. They had computers but nosoftware. They had software but no idea how to use it. Amazingly, in acompany synonymous with the Internet, they weren't getting email addressesfor two weeks.

Parnell briefed CEO John Chambers and got clearance to create Fast Start, acollection of employee-orientation initiatives. Today, computer software tracksthe hiring process and alerts facilities teams just before a new recruit arrives.As a result, every new employee starts with a fully functional workspace and afull day of training in desktop tools (computers, telephones, voice mail).

But Fast Start doesn't just eliminate headaches. It opens people's eyes to lifeinside the company. Each new hire gets assigned a "buddy" (a peer in thecompany) who answers questions about how Cisco works. New employeestake a two-day course called "Cisco Business Essentials," which coverscompany history, the networking market, and Cisco's business units. Twoweeks after new hires start, their managers receive an automaticallygenerated email reminding them to review departmental initiatives andpersonal goals.

Some companies turn orientation into a self-managed project. MEMCElectronic Materials in St. Peters, Missouri, the world's second-largestproducer of silicon wafers, has been hiring as fast as it can over the last fewyears. It's been hard for MEMC to find great people. But it's been even harderto get them working effectively in one of the world's most technicallydemanding industries.

Operations Manager Mike Benton remembers how newly hired factory-floormanagers used to learn what they needed to know: "We crammed it downtheir throats in two weeks." But as the company kept growing, it was not

unusual to find coaches with a month of experience managing operators with


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less than a year of experience. "We had the blind leading the blind," saysBenton.

So he began assigning The Paper. Today when new coaches arrive atMEMC, the last thing they do is start working. Instead they spend four weeks

researching and writing a report that documents how the company handles allof the performance parameters for one step of the manufacturing process.Once they finish the paper, they tag along with a company veteran for severalweeks. Only then do new hires assume management responsibility.

New engineers also spend two days immersed in the company's history andoperations. They then receive a workbook filled with questions about everypart of the company -- from manufacturing to computer systems to purchasingto employee benefits. The engineers have three months to answer literallyhundreds of questions.

Of course, the only way to complete the workbook is to talk to people all overthe company. "It's designed to get people outside their department," says DonOtto, director of employee relations. New employees network like crazy tolearn as much as they can.

Which may be the best way to get up to speed fast. Back at Netscape, afterhe's led the company cheer, CEO Barksdale explains his theory of the"virtuous circle" behind successful companies. Great people build great

products, he tells the recruits. Great products generate big profits, whichprovide resources to attract more great people. "Once you get it going, it's aself-sustaining cycle," he says. "You no longer have to run the business. Thebusiness runs itself."

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