Podcast Ep 53 | The Importance of the Job Scorecard

This week on The Growth Whis­per­ers we dis­cuss the Job Score­card from Brad Smart at Top­grad­ing — and why it’s so impor­tant for suc­cess­ful hiring.

Over our many years work­ing with com­pa­nies we’ve seen great hires and bad hires. One thing we’ve noticed is that lead­ers are often not clear enough upfront about what ​“great” looks like in a role.

The Job Score­card deter­mines what suc­cess will look like in a role. It’s a tool to use dur­ing hir­ing and onboard­ing AND through­out the entire life­cy­cle of each per­son­’s role.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hi there, wel­come to the growth whis­pers where every week we talk about how to build an endur­ing great busi­ness, all the things, you can’t just do one lit­tle thing, if you want to build an endur­ing busi­ness that lasts decades or gen­er­a­tions, there are so many impor­tant things that you need to do. And that’s what we talk about, right here. This week, every week, I’m joined with my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Kevin, how are you doing today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:41

Doing great, Brad, we’ve spent a few hours tonight get­ting ready for this and, and work­ing on some of the things we’re work­ing on. So I think I’m doing real­ly good. Look­ing for­ward to today’s show. It’s a top­ic I’m very, very pas­sion­ate about, because I seen how it pre­vents painful, unnec­es­sary mis­takes in our busi­ness­es. So we will dig into that will tell you more about that in just a few minutes.

Brad Giles 01:06

Oh, yes, we will. And I’m excit­ed to talk about it as well. But as always, we like to start with one phrase or one word, what’s your one phrase or word for today?

Kevin Lawrence 01:19

My word is full. You know, it’s inter­est­ing. I just did we just had our quar­ter­ly meet­ing with our team on Thurs­day. It was awe­some were remote. So you know, we had some, some great plant­i­ngs on a com­bi­na­tion of zoom and mur­al. And we fig­ured out a lot of awe­some stuff, great debates, great deci­sions, and Jan­ice, our team even set us up with all fun activ­i­ty, where every­one got sent a lit­tle box, they weren’t allowed to open. And we had a East­er cook­ie dec­o­rat­ing con­test. Now I might have to con­test the results because I did­n’t win. But we did have an impar­tial judge. My point is we had a lot of fun, it was great. And under that came up with some very, some seri­ous things I need to get done in quar­ter two of this year, which is you know, April through June. I also want to have some time with my kids and my fam­i­ly and friends at the race­track. And you and I have some goals too. So I’m feel­ing like I got a lot of pri­or­i­ties. And I think I might have to and before we start­ed, I was just mak­ing a note, I might need to pare back on some of my oth­er goals because it’s just you know this that, you know, there’s that phrase, you’re bit­ing off more than you can chew Yeah, so I’m full because I think I’ve over com­mit­ted is what it is. And I need to adjust that right away. So that I can have an awe­some quar­ter both for myself and for my work and life too.

Brad Giles 02:56

Oh, very good. Very good. So for that self, myself some­thing slight­ly dif­fer­ent. It’s score­board. So yeah, so I was reflect­ing with the foot­ball sea­son has start­ed up here in Aus­tralia. And this is not soc­cer. Despite Yeah, some may think this is Aus­tralian rules foot­ball. And so that start­ed up again, we’re a cou­ple of games in and I was just reflect­ing Wait a game last week where it end­ed up being a one point dif­fer­ence. And so let’s say it was about 70 or 80 points for the whole match. There was only one point dif­fer­ence. And it was an arm wres­tle the whole way through. And what it made me think is the pow­er and the trust of the school board. And how much that influ­ences the emo­tions of the crowd. Peo­ple are stand­ing up and yelling and peo­ple are com­plete­ly trust­ing in the score­board. And then if you trans­late that back into our busi­ness, Do peo­ple real­ly trust our score­board? You know, they’ve got to trust the score­board to be emo­tion­al about it. They’ve got to know that what are the rules of the game that we’re play­ing? And how much do I trust the score­board that we watch togeth­er? So yeah, that’s what’s on my mind is the score­board and you I know you and I have done a pod­cast episode about dash­boards. And this is kind of on the same thing. But yeah, it was just reflect­ing just how worked up the crowd get because they trust they know the rules, and they trust the scoreboard.

Kevin Lawrence 04:45

That’s inter­est­ing, because you often see in com­pa­nies where peo­ple don’t trust the data that comes from the finance team or the oper­a­tions team. And they spend so much time in pas­sion­ate debates about the num­bers being right or not, and they’re not Be able to focus on the game metaphor­i­cal­ly or what needs to be done in a busi­ness because they’re dis­put­ing the score. And the accu­ra­cy of That’s awe­some. So if we kind of mashed togeth­er our words of the day, we’re going to have a we’re dri­ving for a full score­board, and a full score­board could be a great thing, because that could be equat­ed to win­ning. And or it could also be acquaint­ed to build­ing an endur­ing great com­pa­ny. So today’s show with a full score­board as we talk about score­cards, which is the theme of today, and so today, we’re talk­ing with this won­der­ful thing, called the job score­card devel­oped and pop­u­lar­ized by Brad smart, the author of top grad­ing, his son Jeff did a book called who, as a almost a mid mar­ket ver­sion of the book that takes that has a slight­ly dif­fer­ent ver­sion of it. But real­ly, it’s instead of tak­ing, you know, the gener­ic, typ­i­cal job descrip­tion, which is a almost a lit­tle, lit­tle, lit­tle, lit­tle, lit­tle lit­er­ary piece, a whole bunch of words to describe, try and describe a human, we do more of a math­e­mat­i­cal piece, or an engi­neer­ing piece, and come up with num­bers and facts and data to define the per­son we’re look­ing for. And you know, I recent­ly done a bunch of work with over the past while with Chris Mar saw the this the pres­i­dent of top grad­ing, he runs the busi­ness, on behalf of Brad smart. And we were doing a ses­sion for a group and we were for CEOs that we work with. And I was describ­ing a metaphor, I came up with a job score­card. And I know when Chris and I were chuck­ling about it after­wards, but it’s very sim­ple. It’s like, no most job descrip­tions when we try to defined the spec­tac­u­lar human who is going to cre­ate tremen­dous val­ue on our com­pa­ny. Most of those job descrip­tions are equiv­a­lent to a three year old child’s draw­ing of a bridge. And they can be col­or­ful and inter­est­ing. They just don’t hap­pen to be that pre­cise in help­ing us choose who should be a part of the job and not. And, you know, this job score­card that the smarts have pop­u­lar­ized, is clos­er to an engi­neer’s draw­ing of that same bridge, and noth­ing wrong with start­ing with a child’s draw­ing, right. And that’s a typ­i­cal, we know we need a VP of Finance. And we know that they’re gonna have five direct reports and a team of 25 peo­ple and blah, blah, blah. So that’s kind of like the child’s draw­ing. But then this job score­card is such an amaz­ing tool, we then send it to the engi­neer­ing depart­ment, and have the engi­neers do a bunch of test­ing and math­e­mat­ics and come back with a very pre­cise draw­ing that we’re going to work from, rather than the cray­on sketch. So that’s kind of what we’re talk­ing about today is, is this amaz­ing tool called job score­card. So Brad, like to ask you like, Why? I know why I love it so much. But why do you love this thing? so much? Like Why is it such an impor­tant thing in your mind?

Brad Giles 08:17

I’m gonna answer that by answer­ing, you know, with politi­cians, you ask them a ques­tion, and they answer the ques­tion they real­ly want to be asked. Well, that’s an inter­est­ing thing. But I’m going to answer a dif­fer­ent ques­tion in any sense. So worse. So the rea­son that I love the job score­card is I go back when I had a busi­ness many, many, many years ago, like 20 years ago. And we need­ed to hire a role. And it was a new role to our orga­ni­za­tion. And, you know, we had the mind­set of let’s get it done, right, we’ve got to get things, it’s about the result, it’s about the com­ple­tion, more than it is about what took you to get the com­ple­tion. So in this con­text, we did what so many oth­er entre­pre­neurs do, and we said, Hey, what’s the role? What is the title that we need, and then we would go to the job board, so the online job board, we would copy the job advert that we felt was most aligned to what we need word for word, and then we edit it to our lan­guage, and then we would post it up and that would be about the amount of prepa­ra­tion that we would do at that point. And it was, it was it got the job done? Because that was our mind­set, okay, but it was com­plete­ly inef­fec­tive from that point onward. Okay. So if you say the job to be done was to post an advert, well, what Yeah, we got to post an advert and peo­ple applied to that advert, but we missed a cru­cial step. So the rea­son that I love it com­ing back to your ques­tion, the rea­son I real­ly love it. Is that a bit, because it’s a plan­ning tool, that is a tool that we can use all the way through all of the steps of engage­ment from Hel­lo, my name is bred right through to you’re fired or you’re retired.

Kevin Lawrence 10:20

Yeah. And not only is it some­thing that helps you to define and make sure you actu­al­ly get the right human in the com­pa­ny. Yeah, it’s then a tool to help you to man­age that per­son to great­ness, not giv­ing exam­ples, and peo­ple say, Oh, we need to hire a sales­per­son, well, go find a job descrip­tion online for a sales­per­son copy that put an ad for a sales­per­son, hey, we’ll get a sales­per­son. And the truth is, you might hire an excel­lent sales­per­son. But you might not real­ize there’s prob­a­bly 25 to 30 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of that sales­per­son. It’s like say­ing, it’s like a hunter say­ing they want to go get them­selves a deer. Well, there’s lots of dif­fer­ent types of deer. And there’s, and if you’re not aware, you could get one but it’s not the right one. I’ll give you an exam­ple. So even with sales­peo­ple, there’s inside sales­peo­ple, there’s out­side sales­peo­ple. There’s out­size rela­tion­ship man­ag­ing sales­peo­ple, and there’s out­side hunt­ing sales­peo­ple. And there are dif­fer­ent types of we’re gonna sam­ple just to build off of that, I remem­ber a key exec­u­tive that we hired, he was amaz­ing. He was an A play­er in a dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tion. So he came from a big com­pa­ny with that has been around for years that had process­es and sys­tems. And it had a sales cycle that was 18 to 24 months. And an aver­age sale that was a few mil­lion dol­lars, after many mil­lion dol­lars after that 18 to 24 month sales cycle. He came from that cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment, long sales cycle, big tick­et item. And he came into a busi­ness that had a two hour sales cycle. And he report­ed a and a $30,000, aver­age tick­et size. And he report­ed direct­ly to an awe­some, but some­what crazy entre­pre­neur. So even though this guy had the rate, he was the right type of per­son. If we had had a score­card, we would see that, okay, he does­n’t match on the type of sales. Now he’s type 13 as a sales leader, and we need to type 24 because he does­n’t match that he does­n’t match on the type of per­son that he’s report­ing to you. It says like, there’s a whole bunch of things there that he would pre­dictably fail. But if we had done a real­ly thor­ough score­card and real­ly thought about the can­di­date and eval­u­at­ed him against it, he would­n’t have been hired. Now again, we had the guy end­ed up get­ting let go, he was a won­der­ful man, I love the guy. He just he nev­er could have he, he would nev­er would have suc­ceed­ed in that role. And it’s like, you know, yeah, there’s lots of lots of metaphors for it. But it’s just it was a mis edu­cat­ed hire. And we did­n’t do enough of the right work upfront to real­ly spec with an engi­neer­ing draw­ing of real­ly, who we need­ed to be successful.

Brad Giles 13:32

And that’s an impor­tant point, the, if we go back to the exam­ple that I gave, where­by we’re just copy­ing some­one else’s job advert, and that’s all the prepa­ra­tion that we’re real­ly doing until per­haps the can­di­date arrives for an inter­view, you know, what we’re doing is reduc­ing the chance of a fail­ure by build­ing a job score­card, a detailed job score­card that we’re going to talk about a bit fur­ther on in this pod­cast. But isn’t that what we want? Like, we want to have a much, much bet­ter chance of being able to hire the right per­son, I but then they also we want a tool all the way through that per­son­’s jour­ney that we can use to mea­sure their per­for­mance and their activ­i­ties? And are they going accord­ing to what we need from this role? Are they performing?

Kevin Lawrence 14:28

Yeah, because we’ve real­ly clear­ly defined the rule. That’s the point of it. So let’s talk about the first piece, what is it? And then that first phase, it’s about, you know, the engi­neers draw­ing what you want. The sec­ond phase is eval­u­at­ing peo­ple against that. Right? And if you need the per­son in your bas­ket­ball team, and you need them to be at least six foot six tall, well, that’s an impor­tant piece of data. And if some­one’s only six, one, you know, maybe and I’m not say­ing you know, we’re not going to you dis­crim­i­nate basi­cal­ly in busi­ness, but in bas­ket­ball, you know, if it’s whether it’s height or an abil­i­ty to, to do a slam dunk, or what­ev­er the heck it is that they require, the point of it is, is then you can com­pare them to the engi­neers drawn. So, so let’s go to that first piece. And what is on this score­card is we set up front, it still does have some words, but it’s there more words that define specifics that can be mea­sured, ver­sus feel­ings and beau­ti­ful Pro. Plus, that’s a praise, but prose. So, so grunt, let’s talk about the dif­fer­ent the key dif­fer­ent aspects of it.

Brad Giles 15:38

Yeah, so I guess we’ll start off by say­ing, we may have slight­ly dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives on it. And that’s okay. But we’re prob­a­bly with­in the ball­park togeth­er on most things. So in my expe­ri­ence, what we’ve got is, first of all, a set of respon­si­bil­i­ties. And so that is, you are respon­si­ble for i and b, and c, and then we’ve got the mea­sures of suc­cess are the key per­for­mance indi­ca­tors. And that might be you need to increase the sales bud­get from 100,000 to 130,000. By Octo­ber 2021, or what­ev­er that might be some very, very spe­cif­ic mea­sures of suc­cess that are set in stone that we know exact­ly what that is going to be about.

Kevin Lawrence 16:33

And those can be oper­a­tional met­rics or KPIs on an ongo­ing basis, or they can be tar­gets to achieve with­in a time­frame, like the first year or some­thing like that, but it’s very tan­gi­ble out­comes that that per­son will be account­able for.

Brad Giles 16:47

Yeah, and then recruit­ing points. So that means things that real­ly mat­ter with­in this role that are intan­gi­ble in terms of the KPIs, or the or the respon­si­bil­i­ties. And then the com­pe­ten­cies that this per­son requires. So com­pe­ten­cies, mean­ing, if they’re a sales­per­son, you know, they’ve got to have an engag­ing per­son­al­i­ty, per­haps they’ve got to have good lis­ten­ing skills, they’ve got to have good cus­tomer focus, or good,

Kevin Lawrence 17:26

or first or first or first impres­sion. Yeah, or maybe they need intel­li­gence. Or maybe they don’t. Yeah, and that’s, and that’s why those com­pe­ten­cies are so impor­tant, you’re defin­ing on these 50 dif­fer­ent fac­tors. You can mea­sure human binders, dif­fer­ent set, there’s dif­fer­ent com­pe­ten­cy mod­els out there, the one that they have, is excel­lent, but it’s defin­ing how good they need to be or don’t need to be at it. And it’s pick­ing 10 or 12 of them that are non nego­tiables. If they don’t have them, they can’t do the job. And those that com­pe­ten­cy grid, I tell you, Brad has saved me so much. Yeah, because I know about you, I’m a coach, I believe in peo­ple, I love peo­ple. But even these 50 com­pe­ten­cies are col­or cod­ed. And col­or cod­ed. If it’s easy to change. It can be changed to some hard work, or if it’s very dif­fi­cult to change. And when I look at the ones that are red, and they call very dif­fi­cult to change in my mind, now it’s not chang­ing unless there’s some mas­sive inter­ven­tion. That’s the way I think of it. That’s not what they say. And so I think of it, which real­ly means to me, Hey, Kevin, don’t be opti­mistic. If they don’t have intel­li­gence, it’s not going to change. If they don’t have dri­ve, or ambi­tion, it’s not going to change. If they’re not good with con­flict. They’ll nev­er be good with con­flict. Yeah, and, and it’s a way to keep the opti­mists in the room or from over being there or the pes­simists who say it can’t change. But yet, if it’s a green com­pe­ten­cy, it’s been proven it can so that the com­pe­ten­cies are mas­sive­ly valu­able mass. And if I if I could only keep one piece of the job score­card, you know, I would fight for that to be it because it helps our clients so much again, that’s the spec. That’s the data that helps to cre­ate the engi­neer’s draw­ing the rat­ing on a scale of zero or for one to five on those com­pe­ten­cies. Sor­ry, I got excit­ed with that one, Bri­an, that that one is a game chang­er. It was a life chang­er for me once I saw that, and I could see why I’d been involved in some bad hir­ing decisions.

Brad Giles 19:51

But it real­ly is and what’s impor­tant is that before you meet any can­di­dates, you’re look­ing at these fifth com­pe­ten­cies and you’re say­ing, Well, if it’s a sales per­son in a sales role, and com­pe­ten­cy num­ber 50, for exam­ple is tenac­i­ty. Okay? So if they’re not tena­cious, like it’s very dif­fi­cult to change, and they need to be good at that they need to be tena­cious to suc­ceed as a sales­per­son in our orga­ni­za­tion. So your map­ping lay­er before you meet them, maybe, maybe, oh, no, no, that was an exam­ple. I’m not say­ing they must be across all exceptions.

Kevin Lawrence 20:34

But I’m say­ing in some sales orga­ni­za­tions they would­n’t have that’s the key. Yeah, if it’s a retail sales envi­ron­ment, that that tenac­i­ty, you know, if you know, the rat­ings one to five is three is a aver­age col­lege grad, you know, as a base­line, for exam­ple, on SEO things, like you know, intel­li­gence or oth­er things, but no, like a three might be okay. In them. Now, if we’re run­ning a time­share com­pa­ny in Mex­i­co, you know, the tena­cious tenac­i­ty prob­a­bly needs to be a five, because that’s all hard clothes, high pres­sure sale. And that’s and the key and the fas­ci­nat­ing part about this, the key is get­ting the team that’s doing the inter­views to agree up front. That is crit­i­cal, whether the hir­ing man­ag­er HR, and who­ev­er else is involved in this to agree because that they can’t agree on this that don’t hire don’t even pro­mote the role yet. Yeah, because it’s ma was if we can agree, the where the bridge is going to cross the riv­er. And, and, and what style of bridge that we want. But don’t put it out to bid yet to the con­trac­tors, we need to be clear on what we’re look­ing for, before we move on. It’s, it helps you a lot down the road. But we will find when we start when peo­ple want to hire, and we start ask­ing a bunch of ques­tions. And for exam­ple, I was talk­ing to an entre­pre­neur of the day some­one referred to me, and, and we got talk­ing about this, and as I got­ta hire a new, you know, a new sales­per­son. Well, as I’m talk­ing to him, he’s talk­ing about, oh, both sides of his mouth. He’s talk­ing about hir­ing a sales­per­son. And he’s talk­ing about hir­ing a sales man­ag­er. I’m like, bud­dy, you know, I love your ambi­tion. But you need a sales­per­son and a sales man­ag­er. It’s like a dif­fer­ence between an ele­phant and the most like, they’re, they’re very dif­fer­ent ani­mals, and you’re not going to get an ele­phant most right? You’re not going to get it, you know, you might have a sales­per­son that could go to a sales man­ag­er. Or you might have a sales man­ag­er who’s will­ing to do a lit­tle bit of sales as part of their job. But they’re very dif­fer­ent. It’s a very dif­fer­ent job. It’s a very dif­fer­ent jobs, score­card very dif­fer­ent com­pe­ten­cies for each of those roles. So you got to be clear, oth­er­wise, you’re going to like­ly get your­self in a lot of trouble.

Brad Giles 23:07

Yeah, But so many peo­ple short­change the sales man­ag­er role. That’s a dif­fer­ent pod­cast, I’ll tell you that I could get in deep into that, because the sales man­ag­er is its own thing. But let’s come back. Oh, my god, yes, com­pe­ten­cy assess­ment is a key part of it. So we’ve got the respon­si­bil­i­ties, we’ve got the mea­sures of suc­cess, we’ve got the com­pa­ny com­pe­ten­cy assess­ment, there are these key parts that make it more than job descrip­tion, as some peo­ple may have used that phrase, the old job descrip­tion is going to maybe have a cou­ple of KPIs maybe have a fluffy sen­tence. But it’s not a job score­card. Because this digs in so much deep­er, and it gives you so much gran­u­lar­i­ty. Once you’ve built the job score­card when you begin to inter­view, and maybe even when you write the job advert, because you know, this is exact­ly the type of per­son that we need. I and B then from with­in the pool of can­di­dates that we get were able to under­stand what will an AI play­er actu­al­ly look like? Which, yeah, that’s our goal and a player?

Kevin Lawrence 24:21

Yep, absolute­ly. So you know, if one of our points here is is is that you know, why you need one? Well, you need one because you need to be crys­tal clear about what that role is. And the team involved in the hir­ing needs to be crys­tal clear on it for sure. Not every­one’s just like what is it’s real­ly a detailed, take the job descrip­tion and make it some­thing that’s you know, the finance depart­ment and the legal depart­ment and be hap­py with because it’s so spe­cif­ic, and not for finan­cial legal rea­sons, but tech­ni­cal minds would be very, very hap­py with it. So, you know, in sim­ple How would you just if to boil down? In sim­ple terms, the dif­fer­ences? What would you say, Brad?

Brad Giles 25:07

Which dif­fer­ences

Kevin Lawrence 25:09

between this and a nor­mal job ever doing a nor­mal job descrip­tion? Oh, yeah. So just to boil it down, we’ve cov­ered a lot of law, how would you boil it down?

Brad Giles 25:16

Alright, job, just nor­mal job descrip­tion. Pur­pose of the role. Num­ber one, who you report to, and what your respon­si­bil­i­ties are day to day, maybe some KPIs. That’s what I would expect to see in a nor­mal job descrip­tion. It’s fluffy. And it’s, not as it’s not writ­ten in a spe­cif­ic man­ner. And there­fore, it can’t be used as a tool along the way, in the way in which we want to use the job score­card. Okay, so it’s a bit fluffi­er, it can real­ly let many can­di­dates through that won’t ful­fill the a play­er obligation.

Kevin Lawrence 26:02

Yeah, and it’s clos­er to that child’s draw­ing ver­sus the math­e­mat­i­cal we take, even though some of the con­tent might be the same. If you were just to how would you know beef up that nor­mal job descrip­tion, is when you would short­en down a lot of the words because they don’t help in a lot of cas­es. But you would add in a lev­el those KPIs are those out­comes, those those those deliv­er­ables that first per­son must have? And then the sec­ond thing is you would put in the com­pe­ten­cy, the com­pe­ten­cies and the rat­ings of those com­pe­ten­cies. And those lit­tle two major sec­tions that are game changers.

Brad Giles 26:37

Yeah, oh, you would­n’t get the job descrip­tion and choco­late in the bean and then read top grad­ing and then build the exam­ple. Fri­day, right?

Kevin Lawrence 26:45

The best thing to do? Absolute­ly, Brad, although, you know, I’ve seen sit­u­a­tions where you can take and pull out of that two page, ver­bal job descrip­tion, you can pull, you know, two or three sen­tences out for the descrip­tion of the role. And then you can pull out a few things for some key respon­si­bil­i­ties. And then the rest, you have to sit down and start debat­ing what is it or what Yeah, what isn’t it? It’s, it’s pret­ty clear. So as we dug into, you know, and with com­pa­nies that we work with, you know, and I’ve shared before, like, I demand that our clients use top grad­ing, and that we use job score­cards, it’s not an option. You know, we’ve got two peo­ple on our team who are com­plete­ly focused on top grad­ing and inter­view­ing. So we jet we are We do lots of train­ing on it. And we gen­er­al­ly do the inter­views for the top two lay­ers of the orga­ni­za­tion, direct reports to the CEO, and the ones below that con­sists and some of the roles we get involved in and help with. Because treat­ment cre­at­ing a job score­cards work. And after you’ve done a few it gets easy or, and even then doing the prop­er inter­view the top and we’re going to the pod­cast, we’ve talked about that top grad­ing inter­view. It’s a seri­ous dis­ci­pline. And it’s worth because all and all the top grad­ing inter­view is once you get there is you take the engi­neers draw­ing of the bridge, and you’re just doing an engi­neer­ing spec on the human that you’re inter­view­ing, see­ing if they can match the one of the bridge with data and facts and who they are and how they work and where they thrive and where they don’t. But it’s you know, 1020 times the data you pull out of them. Almost per hour, you have the top grad­ing inter­view. Yeah. Which is that is that sec­ond piece, so let’s go to so let’s just say we’re gonna, we’ve got a com­pa­ny that we’re talk­ing to her and every­thing. Okay, you guys, Brad and Kevin, you’re, you’re say­ing this is the right thing to do? How does some­body get start­ed? Like, when one com­pa­ny approached us and said, okay, we want you to we want to hire you, we want you to help us do all of our job score­cards for our whole com­pa­ny. And, and, and we prob­a­bly said, No, that’s a hor­ri­ble idea. it’s kind of like read­ing. You know, back in the days when we were in school, Brad, and there used to be these things called ency­clo­pe­dias. You know, these big col­lec­tions of books, it would be like read­ing the entire set of ency­clo­pe­dias or read­ing every book in the grade that you’re in school, and then read­ing one exam. You’re gonna fail.

Brad Giles 29:34

Yeah, it’s way too much.

Kevin Lawrence 29:37

So how do we rec­om­mend peo­ple get going with doing a prop­er job scorecard?

Brad Giles 29:46

I’m inter­est­ed in your advice, but your sug­ges­tion, your rec­om­men­da­tion, my thought is when you have a vacan­cy. So as a vacan­cy comes up bid for a new roll or an exist­ing roll, start the process there. And one thing, one very impor­tant thing when hir­ing, we always rec­om­mend hir­ing in pairs. So you would have one can­di­date, and you would have two inter­view­ers, and part of the job of the inter­view is, is to dis­cuss this job score­card before they do the inter­view around all of the com­pe­ten­cies to be able to go in and agree. Yeah, def­i­nite­ly. lik­a­bil­i­ty is hard to change, or easy to change, or what­ev­er, in rela­tion to this role. So hav­ing a clear under­stand­ing, I have the job score­card for that indi­vid­ual where I’m going to do that, because that’s an urgency in terms of hir­ing the per­son, rather than a role where we’re not might not be hir­ing for some­one for three years. So just focus­ing on the most impor­tant things, hav­ing two peo­ple who are run­ning that process and build­ing the job score­card for that, and then mea­sur­ing the per­son, the peo­ple who they inter­view along that journey.

Kevin Lawrence 31:13

Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s one of things we rec­om­mend is start with the active roles. Yeah. And so either it’s the next role you’re gonna hire or pro­mote, because the same process as wire pro­mote required for pro­mo­tions, pro­mo­tions have the same fail­ure rate as exter­nal hires, con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, same risk, because, you know, with the inter­nal can­di­dates, we already know, and love them. And we for­get that there could be big gaps in their capa­bil­i­ty at that next lev­el that will cause them to fail. So yes, that’s it, that’s an excel­lent place to start. For exam­ple, we have anoth­er com­pa­ny that’s approached us, we did a sim­i­lar project over the hol­i­days, but anoth­er com­pa­ny that’s approached us and wants to help with suc­ces­sion of some key lead­ers and the CEO. And, and so that that’s a prime exam­ple. So we’re going to go in and you know, as long as we end up work­ing togeth­er, which like­ly we will, is when we go in, and we will fig­ure out the score­card for the CEO, it says a sub­stan­tial, you know, com­pa­ny, so sub­stan­tial mid mar­ket com­pa­ny. So we will do the score­card for the CEO, that’ll be quite a bit of work to get it and get it right now, thank­ful­ly, the CEO is still in the role, and where we did one before where the CEO and sad­ly had passed away. But bill define the score­card. And then we can start to eval­u­ate exist­ing can­di­dates for that role against what’s required. Now, the good news that CEO is not going any­where, any­time soon. So we’ve got time to devel­op. If they’re devel­opable, devel­opable com­pe­ten­cies, we’ve got three, five years to devel­op the suc­ces­sors to see who can step up and fill those gaps. So it’s a it’s as much as a devel­op­ment process at this stage, as as it is a deci­sion process. Because we’re just going to find, here’s the, you know, the engi­neer­ing spec of the bridge, here’s this per­son, oh, they’re miss­ing these com­po­nents. Let’s see if we can build those into that per­son. What projects can we give them? What train­ing can we do? So in that case, yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a for the the the hot hires that you have a hot top­ic. So the sit­u­a­tions that are live hires, or pro­mo­tions isn’t as is the absolute best place to start from there. Once you start to get it and get a han­dle of the sys­tem, then you’ll nat­u­ral­ly cas­cade it some­where else. But if you do too much too fast, it’ll fall on its face. It’s

Brad Giles 33:37

It’s not gonna work. Last week, we spoke about Joey chest­nut, right? The major league eat­ing cham­pi­on, you can­not, you know, you’re not Joey chest­nut, you can only eat so much or con­sume pro­duce so much so fast. Same prin­ci­ple here, like you can only get so much done. So what’s an anoth­er ques­tion that some­one might ask us? Or maybe think­ing is, well, you know, at the moment, we, we use Myers Brig­gs, or we use a per­son­al­i­ty assess­ment, and that seems to pro­duce good results. Why should I con­sid­er chang­ing my job descrip­tion when this cur­rent sys­tem seems to work? What might be your answer to that? Well, first

Kevin Lawrence 34:23

thing I would ask is, con­firm if they’re mak­ing hir­ing deci­sions only by a psy­cho­me­t­ric assess­ment, which would be in some many cas­es, not legal, and to unin­tel­li­gent, because that’s not enough infor­ma­tion on a per­son. I’m one of the biggest fans of psy­cho­met­rics and we tend to use disc which is like Myers Brig­gs, and ennea­gram and strengths that comes out of Gallup. They’re awe­some. But all they’ll do is if we go into the ani­mal world, say That you’re kind of ele­phant Lake, or your most lake or your lion lake or your giraffe Lake, or your hip­popota­mus like does­n’t mean you’re a good one, or a capa­ble one, it just, it kind of cat­e­go­rizes you into some styles, which is help­ful. And we know from bench­mark­ing and com­pa­nies, you know, there’s a cer­tain roles where ele­phant like per­son­al­i­ties do well. And these oth­er roles rely in types to well, or dri­ve. So it’s, it’s direc­tion­al­ly help­ful. But my gosh, it’s sure not enough to make a prop­er deci­sion. So on hir­ing some­one. And the sec­ond thing I want to ask is temp, temp, tell me, I’d love to see your stats, of what per­cent­age of your hires turn out to be a play­er’s after six months? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I and that’s prob­a­bly good that you don’t. Now I would encour­age that you do. So we can val­i­date. Because if you’re get­ting north, which we aim for North of all of our hires, being what we con­sid­er an A play­er, that’s some­one who fits the cul­ture very well, and con­sis­tent­ly deliv­ers on expec­ta­tions. If 75% of peo­ple that you hire are that after six months, well then stick to what you’re doing, because that’s what we’re try­ing to get to so. So from my per­spec­tive, score­card sets the frame­work. And our firm we do we use disc and ennea­gram, to give us a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the client. But just because if the say the I’m using ani­mal metaphors, just to sim­pli­fy it, but let’s just say that was an ele­phant type pro­file that some of the high­est per­form­ers have had in that role. And this per­son has that same type of pro­file, because you can do pro­file match­ing Yes, assess­ments. Um, but that, but that does­n’t mean I mean, you know, that ele­phant might have men­tal issues, they might have per­son­al issues, they might have, you know, a whole bunch of oth­er things that that psy­cho­me­t­ric won’t tell you so, but the com­bi­na­tion of psy­cho­me­t­ric to help you under­stand them bet­ter. And then an incred­i­bly thor­ough top grad­ing inter­view, gives you a lot of what you need to make the right deci­sion. But hey, if what you’re doing is work­ing, and you’re hap­py with it, you know, why would you change?

Brad Giles 37:30

Well, do you know, in the old­en days, peo­ple used to per­form on stage and in the old­en days, some­times some peo­ple would take toma­toes to that per­for­mance, just in case that per­for­mance was­n’t that great. So grab your toma­toes, get them at the ready, because what I’m going to say is I psy­cho­me­t­ric assess­ment isn’t a job score­card. Okay. It’s Gosh, noth­ing like it. And if it was a spec­trum, Now, I’m not say­ing that it is. But if it was, at one end, you might have a horo­scope. And then mid­dle, you might have a psy­cho­me­t­ric assess­ment, that’s going to give you a bit of a fla­vor. And then the oth­er end dri­ven by a lot of infor­ma­tion and com­pe­ten­cy mea­sure­ment and under­stand­ing and think­ing you’ve got the job score­card. So yeah, at one end, you’ve got the job score­card and the oth­er you’ve got the horo­scope, because Sure, maybe Scor­pios will work bet­ter in your sales team. And maybe we can make that cor­re­la­tion. Okay. And I’m being a lit­tle bit sil­ly here. So hope­ful­ly, you haven’t thrown too many toma­toes. But the point is, they should be advi­so­ry as psy­cho­me­t­ric assess­ment, they should­n’t be the sole deci­sion mak­ing Gosh, though,

Kevin Lawrence 38:54

that would be absolute­ly absurd. And that peo­ple and some peo­ple, and some peo­ple might, but that’s, yeah, it just that just tells you per­son­al­i­ty and com­mu­ni­ca­tion like with, with it with com­mu­ni­ca­tion styles. It does­n’t tell you any­thing, or whether how good they are the dif­fer­ent things you need peo­ple to be good at. And it’s and it’s fas­ci­nat­ing. Now, and then the worst part about inter­view­ing is that, you know, based on research, you know, most peo­ple make their deci­sion with­in about five min­utes of where they’re going to hire the per­son or less in many cas­es. Now, the prob­lem with that you’re gen­er­al­ly judg­ing the per­son by one com­pe­ten­cy in the first five min­utes aside from attrac­tive­ness, which does have an impact on get­ting hired. Which is not a com­pe­ten­cy. But the one com­pe­ten­cy that you’re nor­mal­ly pick­ing up in the first five min­utes, maybe to one, it’s called first impres­sion. And the sec­ond is the one about their ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills. So you’re pick­ing up on those two things, gen­er­al­ly with­in the first five min­utes, and you’re mak­ing a deci­sion now, if they’re gonna be a greeter at Wal­mart, and wel­com­ing peo­ple to come into the store, hey, first impres­sions super impor­tant, right? Or it may be if it’s the host or host­ess in a restau­rant, you know, first impres­sion and ver­bal skills are insane­ly impor­tant. But what per­cent­age of the jobs out there? Do you think that first impres­sion is all that mat­ters? Not many.

Brad Giles 40:35

Yeah, I’d say 15 or 20% any­more. DAX?

Kevin Lawrence 40:39

Yeah. Where I’m say­ing, where’s the only thing that mat­ters? Oh, it will be less than 1%?

Brad Giles 40:44

Yeah, very good. Yeah.

Kevin Lawrence 40:45

Because it’s like, you got to back it up with some­thing. So that’s a prob­lem that most of our hir­ing deci­sions it’s based on first impres­sion and ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and attrac­tive­ness. Well, in most jobs, that’s, that’s less than 1% of the actu­al job. But it’s a huge port por­tion of what’s caus­ing us to make our deci­sions. If we’re tru­ly mak­ing those deci­sions in five min­utes, which months, and that’s what most peo­ple do.

Brad Giles 41:10

Yeah, so the job isn’t to be an inter­vie­wee. Right? So I’m not try­ing to win a job to be an inter­vie­wee and we should exactly,

Brad Giles 41:19

we should have the tool which is the job score­card to be able to deliv­er on that. So quick ques­tion, who builds the job score­card? I think we’ve kind of touched on that. But to be specific.

Kevin Lawrence 41:32

When you get the per­son in the horo­scope depart­ment who real­ly likes psy­cho­met­rics and is a fan of ele­phants. That’s where you get to do the the the job score­card you get those. And they sit there and they cross their knees and they go Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s how you do it?

Brad Giles 41:50

Or, if that did­n’t work, after you tried it a few times who might be the sec­ond best person?

Kevin Lawrence 41:57

Gen­er­al­ly, it should be the hir­ing man­ag­er with the sup­port of HR. Yeah, yeah. So who’s the hir­ing man­ag­er? Yeah, yep. And HR should be a part of it. Because they’re the HR is meant to mas­ter the process­es and hold us to the stan­dards and be mas­ters of these tools. And the best HR peo­ple are, an HR can’t do it, because they know the job well enough. The HR man­ag­er knows the job, but does­n’t know the process nor­mal­ly. And then it should be reviewed by the man­agers man­ag­er. Right. Right. This does a dou­ble check in the process. I just don’t that’s my approach right now. You know, and in some cas­es, then after that, if you’re if it’s a real seri­ous role, if they work, you know, as part of a, you know, a cross func­tion­al teams of pieces like that, you might get some­one from those oth­er cross func­tions to take a look at it as well. You know, this is the crit­i­cal again, the engi­neer­ing of the bridge before you build it is darn impor­tant. Yeah, so get­ting that right is super impor­tant. I will tell you, we debate them. No, we’ll get the peo­ple that the man­ag­er and HR to draft it, the oth­er their man­agers look at it. And then you know, in some some­where that we will debate them, espe­cial­ly for the senior rules. I’m always, always nor­mal­ly part of that. And we debate the heck out of those.

Brad Giles 43:20

Yeah, it’s, it’s so impor­tant to not have a piece of paper­work, but to have a tool that you can use all along the way. And if you say, okay, we’re three weeks, or three months or three years into this role, we can look at this and go Yes, I’m con­fi­dent if the per­son is align­ing with the needs that we’ve got that will be suc­cess­ful in the role so fun­da­men­tal­ly impor­tant. Yes,

Kevin Lawrence 43:52

yes. So why don’t we talk about let’s just say, Okay, you’ve got it, you’ve got a cred­it, great job, great job score­card, using the tem­plates that the peo­ple that top grad­ing, and you know, in the book talk­ing, or who they’ve got some great exam­ples and resources they’ve done, they’ve done an awe­some, awe­some job, make sure that they are get­ting the cred­it for this right, we use it, they devel­oped it, and con­tin­ue to devel­op it. So you’ve got this great job score­card, all the key peo­ple agree, let’s just say that you’ve then learned how to do a prop­er top grad­ing inter­view exca­vat­ing boat­loads of data. And then at the end, you would now go back with data and decide how well the per­son fits? Do they meet those key things that they need to have? Does our envi­ron­ment match the envi­ron­ments that they have thrived in? And if we go and rate the can­di­date on those com­pe­ten­cies, where are their scores per­fect­ly in line, and where are the gaps things that can be closed are the gaps things that we can live with and when­ev­er When you get some­one who’s so pas­sion­ate about account­ing, Oh, we got to hire them. I love them. I love them. I love them. Okay, let’s take a look at the com­pe­ten­cies and look at the facts. You can reground that per­son, or if you’ve got some­one that hates them, well, where in the com­pe­ten­cies were they out? Where don’t they match? And it goes from a feel­ing to a fax con­ver­sa­tion. So let’s just say we’ve got that. Yeah. And, and, and we, and we hired the right can­di­date. Now, that’s eas­i­er said than done. That’s work. But let’s say we got that. Then there’s, you know, get­ting them on board­ed, and then man­ag­ing per­for­mance. So you know, and I know, this is a pas­sion of yours, Brad. So what now that we’ve got the right, clar­i­ty and role and the right per­son, how does this tool set us up to win going forward?

Brad Giles 45:45

Yeah. Cur­rent­ly, I’m writ­ing a book about onboard­ing. I’ve done a research project with 1100, CEOs and hir­ing man­agers around the world. So yeah, pret­ty pas­sion­ate about it, do for at least at some point, hope­ful­ly, in the next year, or 18 months, it’s com­ing along. Well. So to your ques­tion, how, what does suc­cess look like from the man­agers per­spec­tive, that’s real­ly a cen­tral part, which is why the job score­card is so piv­otal between the hir­ing process and the onboard­ing process. This is the vehi­cle that car­ries us through so there isn’t a sup­ple­men­tal com­po­nent to this, which is the onboard­ing plan. But that feeds straight off the job score­card. Okay, so the job score­card should­n’t tell us should give us a direc­tion or a com­pass on with­in 90 days, this per­son will have this lev­el of clar­i­ty and just like you’re build­ing a job score­card to for the role that will help us to under­stand the hir­ing process. And for­ward, the onboard­ing plan is very much about the first 90 days, because we want to have con­fi­dence to fire the per­son. Okay, we won’t have con­fi­dence to fire that per­son, in 90 days time, legal­ly, because the research that I’ve done almost all let’s say most coun­tries around the world have leg­is­la­tion, which says that you can fire a per­son, if they’re the wrong per­son, with­in 90 days. Now, of course, check with your local employ­ment law expert, okay. But that’s why this 90 day peri­od is so cru­cial, because we want to have con­fi­dence to exit the per­son if they’re not right, or to even extend that pro­ba­tion peri­od. And so, the job score­card, it tells us what the per­son will do, and then the onboard­ing plan will tell us how good it how the per­son what the per­son must achieve with­in 90 days.

Kevin Lawrence 48:06

So basi­cal­ly, you take that job score­card and you build the onboard­ing plan based on that cor­rect of how you’re going to get them up to speed. And you know, what’s inter­est­ing, Brad, and I’m excit­ed to see when your book comes out, because, man, do I see the onboard­ing get messed up a lot? A lot. Yeah, the best, the best, the best com­pa­nies I’ve seen do it, they have a very, very defined process for that three-month peri­od, with reg­u­lar check ins, sched­uled pieces, and putting the per­son in the right psy­cho­log­i­cal state to win. And you know, I have a chat with every new exec­u­tive that comes into the com­pa­nies I work with that I get the chance to, and say, Hey, in the first three months, lis­ten, learn, we already know you’re awe­some. Don’t go and try and prove your­self. Because if you try and prove your­self, you do way too much, way too fast and gen­er­al­ly make a mess. The Smart still super expe­ri­enced peo­ple already know that. But a lot of peo­ple are so pas­sion­ate and excit­ed and want to show their val­ue. And, and they just they make ene­mies and they and they make they cre­ate prob­lems in the sys­tem very, very ear­ly on. And then again, it’s that’s one tiny piece of a prop­er onboard­ing. Tiny, tiny piece that can make or break espe­cial­ly an exec­u­tive role

Brad Giles 49:25

to pick up on your first point there. The real­ly inter­est­ing data from the research that I’ve done. 86% of com­pa­nies have a 14 day or less onboard­ing process, okay, 14 days or less. But the real mag­ic hap­pens, the real change in impact hap­pens after 30 days. Okay, so that 30 6090 days the com­pa­nies had that had those lev­el of onboard­ing process­es. That’s where you real­ly start to see that com­pa­ny. We’re say­ing, this is where the real impact hap­pens. So it’s, that’s why I love onboard­ing. Because it’s like this, this great oppor­tu­ni­ty that no one that 86% of peo­ple don’t real­ly know or pay respect to. And that’s where the real mas­sive gains ahead, look­ing for­ward. But maybe onboard­ing is for anoth­er pod­cast, like a nice, thank

Kevin Lawrence 50:24

you. It’s my Brad, the key, the key point of this of every­thing that we’re talk­ing about here is, is that you have this amaz­ing engi­neer­ing draw­ing the score­card of a role, then you can use that to define onboard­ing and how we’re going to get them to move ahead. All right, last piece you want to men­tion, and we’ll wrap up here, Brad, is that it’s also help­ful in per­for­mance man­age­ment. So when some­one isn’t doing well, in their role, you can go back to the score­card, which of the com­pe­ten­cies, are they not thriv­ing? Are they hav­ing a prob­lem with? Where is it they’re fail­ing ver­sus Oh, I don’t like them over this, you can go back to the com­pe­ten­cies or the core val­ues, and then help pin­point the issue. And that might help you because just being able to break a per­son down into 50 dif­fer­ent pieces essen­tial­ly, helps you to point pin­point what might help them to grow.

Brad Giles 51:17

So to give us a prac­ti­cal answer, to give a prac­ti­cal exam­ple of that, one of the com­pe­ten­cies is orga­ni­za­tion. Okay, yep. And so it may be with that with­in the job score­card, one of the com­pe­ten­cies, so it may be an absolute require­ment, like a five, to do this role, you need to have a five out of five on orga­ni­za­tion. So then you’re going back in a per­for­mance man­age­ment review a year into the future, and you’re say­ing, I can see why this per­son is fail­ing, because they real­ly only a two, maybe a three out of five on orga­ni­za­tion, that that’s the issue here. So that’s how you can use the job score­card com­pe­ten­cy assess­ment, dur­ing per­for­mance appraisals in the future. It just came inter­est­ing idea.

Kevin Lawrence 52:07

I’m work­ing with my daugh­ter on her busi­ness bribe, and she’s hav­ing a hard time keep­ing up with some things. And I just think­ing she needs her­self to get a bit more orga­nized. Right. And that’s some­thing you can learn. But she has­n’t learned it yet. And I got an idea that I might need to share with her. That’s per­fect. Okay, so let’s go back to the begin­ning, real­ly, we’re talk­ing about in today’s show what this thing called a job score­card devel­oped by Brad smart, the author of top grad­ing, it’s an amaz­ing tool and resource that we are both mas­sive fans on it’s a game chang­er. And even when I did the book, scal­ing up and inter­viewed 50 CEOs around the world, eight of them cit­ed top grad­ing as being a game chang­er for their busi­ness. That’s how I got trained on it. And that’s how I became so pas­sion­ate about it just because it’s evi­dence data, it makes a dif­fer­ence. So with­in that there’s this thing called the job score­card where you do an engi­neer’s draw­ing of what the job is and what great looks like ver­sus a you know, a kid’s cray­on draw­ing, but most job descrip­tions unfor­tu­nate­ly result in that’s the root of it. We’ve talked about why it’s pow­er­ful, how it can help you how to use it, the idea that the team that’s hir­ing needs to be aligned around it. After they meet can­di­dates instead of an emo­tion­al dis­cus­sion. You go back and eval­u­ate on it. And it’s just a very, very potent and pow­er­ful tool that helps you to get bet­ter peo­ple on your team and avoid the pain for your­self and can­di­dates and putting the wrong peo­ple in a spot where they’re going to fail.

Brad Giles 53:38

Awe­some. Absolute­ly fan­tas­tic tool before you hire any­one. Make sure before you even decide make sure that you build a job score­card. Alright, so if you need more infor­ma­tion on job score­cards, you can vis­it one of our web­sites. Geez, that’s the clos­est thing that we’ve ever come to an advert but

Kevin Lawrence 53:58

that’s that is wow.

Brad Giles 54:01

Alright, so you can find Kevin at Lawrence and co​.com You can find myself at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com dot a year. Thank you for lis­ten­ing as always The growth Whis­per­er is Kevin and Brad, we look for­ward to hav­ing a chat to you every week about build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies. do enjoy your week. We look for­ward to see­ing you next week. Take care Have a good one.