HIRING DARLA – AN UNUSUAL APPROACH

Interview by Nick Cordodilos of Brooke Allen, founder of No Shortage of Work.

Nick Corcodilos, host of AskTheHeadhunter.com and author of How Can I Change Careers? and How to Work with Headhunters. Nick also publishes the free weekly Ask The Headhunter Newsletter.

Brooke Allen is the founder of No Shortage of Work. He recently hired an assistant. This is the story of how he went about it.

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Nick: A few months ago, I received what appeared to be a mass emailing from you announcing an entry-level position. Do you always write to everyone you know every time you want to hire someone?

Brooke: Yes.

Nick: Does anyone become annoyed?

Brooke: Seldom. I have over 3,000 contacts and there was only one complaint. A guy said he was a senior executive who had been out of work for over a year, and this position was beneath him.

Nick: But, your email asked if I knew of anyone who might be interested; it didn’t presume I should be interested.

Brooke: That’s right. This fellow was only thinking of himself. The second response was from the wealthiest person I know… he’s worth billions… and he said, “I’ll see who I can find.” Later, when I thanked him for his time, he said, “No problem. Everyone has to start somewhere.”

Nick: I bet I can guess why the first guy is unemployed, and the second is wealthy.

Brooke: My words exactly.

Nick: How many responses did you get?

Brooke: Perhaps 20 from the mailing. We also ran an ad on Craigslist, and some people reposted it elsewhere, so within two weeks we had about 200 applicants.

Nick: How did you read all those resumes?

Brooke: I didn’t. For a position like this, I hire for attitude and aptitude, not for resume writing skills.

Nick: What do you care about?

Brooke: Two things – Integrity, people who lack integrity are really bad news.

Nick: And the second thing?

Brooke: The ability to do the work. You taught me that years ago. It’s all about the work.

Nick: Thank you. How do you find out if they can do the work?

Brooke: For every position, you must not be lazy and be able to read and write English. If you sent a resume, I sent you a four page email describing the work, our group, the company, and our industry. I tried to answer the questions I could anticipate, even ones that might put us in a negative light, and I closed by asking you to send me your unanswered questions; if you were interested in the position, you should tell me why. If you didn’t respond, either you were not interested, which is fine, or you are lazy, can’t read, or can’t write, which means you don’t meet the minimum qualifications for the job.

Nick: How many responded?

Brooke: About 40. It always seems to be about 20% no matter what job I’m advertising.

Nick: So, did you read those resumes?

Brooke: I did not. I asked them to give themselves a grade on various skills such as: Spreadsheets, HTML, writing and editing, accounting, programming. Grades were:

E – Expert (could teach others)

G – Good (but could get better with further self-study and practice)

P – Poor (but willing to learn more)

N – No experience at all (but willing to learn)

U – Uninterested in this skill – don’t care to learn, or work in this area

Nick: How did know if they were being honest?

Brooke: I explained that if they told me now they weren’t good at something, we would send them to training after we hired them. But, if they told us they were good, and they weren’t, we wouldn’t hire them no matter what, of if we didn’t figure it out until after we hired them, we’d fire them. I also set a tone of honesty in how I described ourselves – both the good and the bad. Our mantra, “no nasty surprises later” and people like that. Few people want to be dishonest, even to land a job.

Nick: How many people were you down to now?

Brooke: Twenty-seven. I invited them all in for one of three open houses.

Nick: How did people feel about a mass interview like that?

Brooke: I made it clear that we were not going to interview them; they were coming to interview us. When they arrived, I gave them $20 for their time, a book about Wall Street, and we had pizza.

Nick: That must have cost at least $1,000. Where did the money come from?

Brooke: The money came from not paying an H. R. person six figures to tell me how to hire someone. It came from not paying $10,000 to a headhunter to send me resumes that I might have then had to read. It came from not running ads in Monster and CareerBuilder. It came from profits made by the great people I’ve already hired this way. $1,000 is a pittance compared to the cost of hiring the way most people usually do.

Nick: But in this market, people are so desperate for an interview, you don’t need to give them anything.

Brooke: Perhaps, but I wanted to thank them for giving me one of the most important things anyone can ever give.

Nick: What’s that?

Brooke: A choice. Unfortunately, in this market, most people don’t think they have many choices. They have plenty – they just don’t think they do, but that’s another conversation.

Nick: What did you talk about when they came?

Brooke: The work, our company, our mission, and so on. Then they discussed ways they could help each other find work.

Nick: Why do you care if they find work elsewhere?

Brooke: Because I want people to work for me because they choose to, not because they think they have no choice. Besides, if I were them, that is how I would like to be treated.

Nick: Many employers claim to be good to their employees, but why be good to people you haven’t even hired yet?

Brooke: I believe we’re all in this together. For me, hiring someone is getting a bunch of people to help me solve my problem. But, having them work on my problem without caring about theirs seems selfish. I know how I’ll help the person I hire, the trick is to find time-efficient ways to help the people I can’t hire. This approach seems to pay dividends, but I can’t tell you why.

Nick: Does your approach take a lot of time?

Brooke: Not really. Remember, I’m sending out mass mailings and  holding group meetings, so I’m not repeating the same thing with individuals. In essence, I’m having my candidates do the work of determining if we are right for them before they bother me with an application.

Nick: After the open house, how many were still interested?

Brooke: About a dozen. So, now we began reading resumes and their skills inventories. We called in six people to spend half a day learning the job. No interviews in the traditional sense – just work and rubbing elbows.

Nick: Did people prove to be honest about their skill levels?

Brooke: Yes. The important thing we got to see was how well they learned. Some people might be superb at something, but learning the next marginal thing proves difficult. Others didn’t know what we were talking about at first but caught on immediately. I prefer the second type because we’re always operating right on the cusp of not knowing how to do the next thing that needs to be done.

Nick: Then what?

Brooke: We ranked our candidates. Our first choice was a woman I will call Alice – it was almost embarrassing how easy everything was for her. I called her up and said I’d like to make an offer. The salary was $35,000 and was non-negotiable, but I was willing to pay for graduate school. I told her I wanted her to think about whether it was in our best interest to hire her, and I would think if it was in her best interest to accept an offer.

Nick: That is what you talked about, “If the shoe were on the other foot, would you hire me?”

Brooke: Yes, except that we did it by email. I wrote an essay, and so did she. When we were both ready, we swapped.

Nick: And…

Brooke: I had written about three pages. For this to be her best choice, I would have to offer her much more of a career path than I had planned on, so I discussed how that might progress.

Nick: What did she write?

Brooke: She said that she realized that she wasn’t sure what she wanted, and this period of unemployment was a good time to explore. She also said she had developed a moral dilemma in that she saw that taking this job would deprive someone else – and this wasn’t just abstract, she had met those other people. She wanted to withdraw.

So, we decided to work together on some side projects that interest me and that might help her figure out what she wants to do.

We moved to our second choice.

Nick: Who was?

Brooke: I’ll call her Betty. She had created an on-line group so our various job candidates could interact and help each-other find work. Not only did she have the technical skills, she had a good heart.

Nick: A good heart? Is that important to you?

Brooke: Yup, we even put that in a job ad once. People laugh, but I suggest if you are at a big firm, you should try the experiment; populate one department with good-hearted people, and hire only nasty people into another one. Wait a year and see how things go. I can’t afford to do that experiment.

Anyway, Betty called back the next day to say she wanted to withdraw. She wanted to see if she can make her business work. I had my own business like hers once, and I know you can sometimes get in a rut, and it is good to talk to someone. To give up on something she’d worked so hard on might not be her best decision.

Nick: So, in this market, you’ve had your top candidates turn you down!

Brooke: That’s right, I prefer it that way. I hate telling people “no.” Next, I called Darla. Previously, she had told me she was interested in going to grad school for marketing, but now she confessed there was nothing in business school that interested her.

Nick: So, it was on to number four?

Brooke: Not at all. Darla was honest, which is refreshing. Besides, I have an MBA and it was an almost complete waste of time. I asked her, “Is there nothing you want to learn?” and she said, “Lots of things… just not in business school.” So, I asked her to make a list of all the things she wanted to learn, and whether, if she were me, I should pay for her to learn them.

Nick: And she said?

Brooke: Excel-yes, Powerpoint-yes, AutoCAD-Maybe, Watercolor Painting-No, Statistics-maybe, Cooking-no, Creative writing-maybe. The list went on. She was clearly an interesting person.

Then I asked her for what she thought I would want her to learn that she would agree to learn. She listed: Accounting principles, Project management, Adobe Illustrator, Logic, etc.

Nick: So, did you hire her?

Brooke: We went back and forth – I brought up reasons working here wouldn’t be in her best interest and she brought up reasons she might not be our best candidate. We couldn’t find any insurmountable problems, so I made an offer and she accepted. She’s great, there have been surprises, but they have all been positive, at least for me.

Nick: Are you sending her to school?

Brooke: Nope, better than that. She is studying on her own and teaching what she has learned to the rest of us. I buy each of us a copy of the same book, and she presents it. Last month she did writing and next month she does accounting. The fact is we’re all doing this now; someone presents a book each week. If we keep this up for a year, all six of us will have a library of about 50 books and it will cost me less than had I sent Darla to two college courses!

Nick: Why didn’t you think of that earlier?

Brooke: Because I hadn’t met a candidate who didn’t want to go to college. I’ve probably spent $100,000 sending my employees to grad school and I personally have gotten less out of it than six weeks of Darla not going to school.

Nick: Did you ever read Darla’s resume?

Brooke: Near the end. It wasn’t that impressive, a degree in Geography from Thomas Edison State University, which I had never heard of… some experience doing historic preservation. I might have tossed her resume. It wasn’t until after getting to know her that I discovered she’d gone for the first three years at the University of Chicago. There were some other things that might have eliminated her.

Nick: Like what?

Brooke: The attachments to her first email didn’t open, so I asked her to resend them as pdfs. She got lost coming to an open house and so I told her to come to the next one. I think that HR people who play the elimination game might have rejected her for any of those reasons, which aren’t good enough in my opinion.

Nick: Did she write a cover letter?

Brooke: Funny you should ask. A few weeks after I hired her I went back and looked. She was the first person to send a real cover letter, sixteen minutes after my ad ran on Craigslist, and it was perfect. Because my ad said she needed to know how to write, she attached an essay she’d written in college. Then she asked two questions, and I quote:

1. Do you like going to the office every day? I want a job I like going to, so it’s pretty important that current employees are generally happy where they are at your company.

2. What growth is involved in this position? I don’t usually define my life by my current job, but it’s also nice to know I can move up within a company after putting my best efforts forth and being rewarded for such.

How cool is that?

Nick: But you did not read the cover letter when Darla originally sent it?

Brooke: I did read it when it came in, and I added her questions to the list I was accumulating. However, I did not use cover letters as part of my decision making process. If someone was too busy to write a good cover letter, it did not mean they were not a good candidate for me. However, it is such a great pleasure to discover that her cover letter is consistent with the forthright, responsive, and talented person I hired.

Nick: You would recommend people ask their hiring manager if they like going to work every day?

Brooke: Absolutely, although people do lie. I asked that question on an interview at Merrill Lynch once, and the guy told me how great the place was. The following week, I interviewed with the same person, but now he was at the New York Stock Exchange. I asked him why he had changed jobs over the weekend. He said, “Merrill sucked… I hated working there. I couldn’t tell you that last week because I worked for them” That tells you something about a place if part of your job description includes lying.

Nick: You enjoy hiring people, don’t you?

Brooke: Absolutely, it is the best part of my job.

Some people like shopping for a car. I don’t. I like shopping for talent – and people are so much more interesting than cars. Besides, the people I hire this way don’t seem to need much management, so I’ve got to find something to do with my time.

I learn so much, I meet so many wonderful people, and I can usually help some of the people I can’t hire.

Speaking of which, what advice would you have for good people in this awful market?

Nick: Let’s meet soon and discuss this.

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Note: This approach is one that Brooke Allen has used on occassion with his current ventures, and former employers. It does not represent policy or standard practice of any particular organization, and it is not even the only way he has gone about hiring all his employees.