Amazon now employs more than 750,000 people around the world. In 2019, the e-commerce giant hired nearly 100,000 workers in the third quarter alone.
But only 25 years ago, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was looking to make his very first hire for the company that was then being called Cadabra. He was looking for software developers, fluent in C, C++, and Unix, to help build the systems that would be the backbone of his fledgeling company.
On August 22, 1994, Bezos published this job post on Usenet, an early online bulletin board and discussion network:
The job post has a confident, almost swaggering brevity. No words are wasted — Bezos cuts right to the chase: He is looking for people who will “help pioneer commerce on the Internet.” But it’s the second sentence that is most telling: “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.”
The sentence — impatient, cocky, almost scornful — demands that developers show up convinced of their own superiority.
Clearly, Amazon’s stunning transformation of the world of retail suggests Bezos both knew what he was doing and found the extraordinary talent he was seeking 25 years ago.
It’s worth taking a few minutes to look at what makes this early job posting work:
1. Less is more — shorter job posts elicit more applications
It pays to get to the point. On average, candidates will spend 14 seconds deciding whether or not to apply, and shorter posts (300 words or fewer) get 8.4% more applicants than an average post.
GeekWire gave the primal Amazon posting to the team at Textio for an analysis. Textio, an augmented writing platform that evaluates writing for gender bias and other shortcomings, found the post to be “too short” and rated it a 19 out of 100.
But the post actually manages to say a lot in a short space. Admirably, it doesn’t cloud its message with a list of nice-to-have qualifications. It is clear about needing someone who writes code quickly and confidently and communicates clearly.
2. Focus on the things that matter most — comp, qualifications, job details
And, in his own terse way, Bezos touches on all three.
Comp? “Your compensation,” the post says, “will include meaningful equity ownership.” Can you say bazillionaire?
Qualifications? “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems” and “have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent.”
Job details? Successful candidates will “help pioneer commerce on the Internet.” If he’d had more details, he wouldn’t have been hiring pioneers. Bezos was also leery of people finding out exactly what he was up to, something he felt would lessen his competitive advantage in getting to e-commerce early.
3. Publish your job post on Mondays, when application rates are the highest
LinkedIn data found that viewing and application rates are highest on Mondays and slowly decline as the week passes by. Bezos did not have access to that statistical insight when he posted for developers — LinkedIn wouldn’t be founded until Amazon was nearly a decade old.
Final thoughts: No matter how prescient the founder’s vision is, talent is always key to making it a reality
Amazon began as an online bookseller, but Jeff Bezos’s vision was always to be “The Everything Store,” as author Brad Stone calls his 2013 book that examines the evolution of the company. Bezos’s relentless (he also considered calling Amazon “Relentless.com”) pursuit of that dream is the foundation for the company’s implausible and runaway success.
But the vision only started to become a reality when the Amazon founder began to hire the people who executed it. Talent is critical to any organization’s success, so you want to make sure that your job postings reflect who you are and what you’re hoping to do — whether you’re hiring one person or one hundred thousand.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Blog 2020 by Bruce Anderson
Recruiters have a front-row seat to the ever-changing mix of skills most prized by the business world. Understanding what those skills are early on can give you a leg up on the competition. And while the soft skills valued by companies tend to change gradually, the most sought-after hard skills evolve lickety-split, pushed largely by the relentless transformation of modern technology.
Last year, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and analytical reasoning led LinkedIn’s global list of the most in-demand hard skills. They’re all on the list again this year, but a skill we weren’t even looking at a year ago — blockchain — tops the list of most in-demand hard skills for 2020.
And whether you’re looking to hire someone with blockchain chops or expertise in, say, video production (No. 10 on the list), you’ll be making sure your candidates have a desirable mix of soft skills as well. Our list of the most in-demand soft skills is headed by creativity, just as it was in 2018 and 2019. But slipping in at No. 5 is a newcomer, emotional intelligence, a skill important in just about every role.
What are hard and soft skills? Hard skills concern an employee’s ability to do a specific task, and soft skills are more about the way they do them — how they adapt, collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions.
Hard skills include specialized knowledge and technical abilities, such as software development, tax accounting, or patent law expertise. They’re often easier to define and measure than soft skills.
Soft skills are more about behavior and thinking, personal traits and cognitive skills. They’re typically more difficult to measure, but they can also help a person thrive in a variety of roles and industries.
Here are the TOP 5:
Creativity
Persuasion
Collaboration
Adaptability
Emotional Intelligence
In looking for soft skills, companies are focusing on candidates with emotional intelligence
While hard skills are usually very specific to a person’s role in their company, the top soft skills — creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence — are needed to be successful in nearly any role.
New to the list this year, emotional intelligence has different meanings to different people. But Daniel Goleman, author of the 1995 best-seller Emotional Intelligence, has pointed to a mix of self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. Others cite the ability to recognize emotions, your own and those of others, and to use emotional information as fuel for productive thinking and behavior.
You can screen applicants for EQ by asking references targeted questions, such as how did the candidate handle a previous mistake or what motivates them; giving candidates personality assessments; or bringing them on for short-term projects. Managers can also build emotional intelligence on their current teams by, say, modeling appropriate behavior, making feedback regular and fact-based, and providing assertiveness training.
Emotional intelligence, of course, is not just important in the people you’re recruiting. It’s critical in your role as a recruiter. Everyone has some level of EQ, but there are some practices you can adopt to sharpen yours. They range from embracing criticism as a learning opportunity to exploring the “why” in every situation.
With your emotional intelligence honed, you’ll be ready to find and attract candidates with exactly the skills your organization needs most, whether they’re completely old school like sales and business analysis or something as new age as blockchain and cloud computing.
First published at LinkedIn TalentBlog 2020 by Bruce Anderson
Take a moment to consider the following: If your company hires 100 people in the next 12 months, that’s an annual increase in compensation costs of at least $10 million if you factor in average total compensation of $100,000 per person. Clearly, the total cost of hiring dwarfs the cost per hire, and no matter how you cut it, that’s a lot of money. Unfortunately, much of this spend will be wasted by hiring the wrong people.
here are 10 tips to help you avoid those $100,000 hiring mistakes:
1. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a wine by its label. A good rule of thumb is to wait 30 minutes before making any yes/no hiring decisions, as you’ll minimize the impact of first impression bias. (Here are some ideas on how to wait the 30 minutes and for eliminating bias of any type.)
2. Ensure recruiters and hiring managers have clarified expectations before the hire. It’s impossible to assess someone properly for ability, fit, and motivation without having a complete grasp of the actual work the person will be doing. Worse still, recruiters who can’t describe the actual work to top tier candidates when they ask “Tell me about the job?” won’t be able to convince them to become serious candidates.
3. Don’t screen on compensation and skills too soon. The strongest candidates are willing to negotiate the compensation if the job represents a true upward career move. Recruiters often short-circuit the chance to hire these people by only checking boxes for skills and forcing candidates to agree to a compensation range before they know anything about the job.
4. Conduct exploratory phone screens. You’ll save time, increase assessment accuracy, and close more deals within your budget by only inviting semi-finalists for onsite interviews. A structured phone screen can ensure the people you invite onsite are not only top performers, but also the kind of candidates who would see the open role as the best career move among competing alternatives.
5. Don’t use generic competencies and behavioral interviewing without context.Asking for examples of competencies and behaviors without describing how they will actually be used on the job is a mistake. It’s like assuming people will always go the extra mile just because they’ve done it a few times. Doing it all of the time in different situations is what matters.
6. Don’t ignore the fit factors. Even the most able candidates will underperform if their working style clashes with the hiring manager, if they don’t fit with the team and company culture, and if they’re not intrinsically motivated to do the actual work required with the resources provided. The Hiring Formula for Success describes how to relate ability with these fit factors to accurately predict on-the-job performance.
7. Assess strangers using the same process used to assess acquaintances. People known to the hiring manager or who come highly recommended via referral are assessed on their past performance and future potential. I find that this hiring approach is very accurate in predicting subsequent performance. On the other hand, those who apply without a reference or their foot in the door are evaluated on their years of experience, depth of skills, and how well they interview. This much-too-common approach is not nearly as accurate. Here’s how strangers can be assessed like acquaintances.
9. Don’t use a surplus of talent strategy when a surplus of talent doesn’t exist. Weeding out the weak using advanced technology and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence will backfire if the best people aren’t applying or get weeded out for reasons that don’t predict performance. Instead, go with an “attract the best” high touch talent strategy that offers career growth over some ill-defined lateral transfer.
10. Hire for Year One, not Day One. Avoid falling into the trap of hiring to fill a job quickly. A “Win-Win” hiring process requires the hiring manager and the new hire to both agree it was the right decision one year after the position was filled.
I’m not sure if hiring managers should be allowed to hire people on their own if they don’t have a proven track record of doing it. I’m also not sure if B-level managers are able to hire A-level talent. What I am sure of, though, is that these 10 ideas are effective for any hiring manager who wants to hire the very best — and avoid making any future $100,000 mistakes.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Blog 2019 by Lou Adler
Peter Sursi is an experienced Senior Executive in HR/Talent Acquisition, focussed on growing and shaping the future of the FBI.
To help recruiters reach their diversity targets, FBI recruitment team of Peter Sursi focused on improving old and ineffective processes.
“All our processes had not changed in a million years,” Peter says. “Again, the more we went and looked at them, the more problems we found.”
One major problem area was a standardized test that was creating an adverse impact among some underrepresented candidate pools. Over the course of two years, Peter’s team developed an entirely new test, interviewing 2,000 agents, and performing a thorough analysis to tailor the test more closely to the job requirements.
After passing the standardized test, candidates undergo an interview and writing exam. But the interview questions hadn’t been updated in 10 years — and the exam hadn’t changed in 20. So Peter’s team replaced both, then put all interviewers through mandatory interview and unconscious bias training.
These changes were helpful, but there was still a problem: many candidates weren’t even making it that far. After speaking to IT, Peter’s team discovered that 40,000 candidates who had begun filling out the special agent application form had never completed it.
The team reached out to these candidates to gain a better understanding of the issue. The answers were clear: the application process was too long and demanded too much information all at once. And since Peter already knew this was causing women and people of color to drop out of the process at higher rates, something had to change — and fast.
“We stripped the application down to the studs,” Peter says. “We said, ‘What is the absolute minimum information we need to gather to get you to phase one?’”
By simplifying the initial application process, Peter’s team discovered that candidates were not only more likely to complete the application but were more emotionally invested in the job. Passing the first test on the path to becoming an FBI special agent made them feel good, so when they were asked to submit more information later, they were more incentivized to see it through.
Excerpt from:
How the FBI Overhauled Its Hiring Process to Improve Diversity and Create a Better Candidate Experience, by Samantha McLaren, posted on LikedIn Talent Management Blog, 2019
This is a tactic every company can use to avoid missing out on great talent who might otherwise drop out. Get candidates in the door first by focusing only on essential requirements, then focus on the nice-to-haves along the way.
USA Swimming’s long-time high-performance consultant Russell Mark has his fingerprints on many of those 123 medals. Russell studies video and data then makes suggestions to swimmers and coaches to help them achieve faster times. In fact, The Washington Post recently called Russell the team’s “secret weapon.”
So, during the recent USA Swimming National Championships at Stanford University, LinkedIn invited Russell to speak to our Global Talent Organization about what it takes to coax ever-better performances from the best swimmers in the world. We were excited to hear what he could teach us about creating high-performing teams and about giving people insights that allow them to become more effective and productive. Here are a few things we learned:
1. Breakthroughs come from understanding convention and having the courage — and support — to challenge it
An easy trap for top-performing teams to fall into is letting success get in the way of innovation. This is what Russell confronted when he joined USA Swimming in 2002 as a 22-year-old with a freshly minted degree in aerospace engineering and a background as a competitive collegiate swimmer. He had a sense that things could be done better but he also faced decades of institutionalized — and largely unquestioned — beliefs about swim technique.
“I had to understand where the conventional thinking came from,” he says, “which was the science and information available at the time, reinforced by very respected people in the sport. And I had to adopt the mind-set of proactively going out and looking for ways it could be done differently and better, and studying why and how that worked, to get to new thinking with some facts and evidence behind it.”
So, data and a growing comfort interpreting it became Russell’s friends. Seventeen years later and more established in his field, Russell tries to make sure that he doesn’t become calcified in his thinking. For example, in breaking down the races of high school backstroke phenom Regan Smith, Russell noted that her starts were shockingly average. In the first 15 meters, she was falling behind. Starting in February, the team gave Regan focused work on her start. She trimmed four-tenths of a second off her time in the first 15 meters — and set world records in both the 100- and 200-meter backstroke at the World Championships in July.
Like world-class swimmers, successful large-scale businesses often have a hard time embracing innovation (even when they’re the source of it). Kodak, for example, invented the digital camera but didn’t change its focus and eventually had to file for bankruptcy. Innovation is hard, but you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture. Turning to data rather than relying on hunches or habit can help you stay ahead of the pack.
2. Culture is the foundation of both team and individual success
Russell attributes much of USA Swimming’s success to a strong team culture. What many do not appreciate is the diversity of the team, from athletes in their teens (freestyler Katie Ledecky, who has five Olympic golds, was 15 when she first swam at the Olympics) to veterans in their 30s and sometimes 40s (freestyle sprinter Dara Torres was 41 when she earned three silvers at the 2008 Olympics).
“To enable our athletes to perform,” Russell says, “we need to have a great team environment — a place where everybody from all around the country and all different backgrounds and ages feels comfortable.” Creating this atmosphere can include everything from joint training sessions to making viral lip dub videos. “People point to how much fun we’re having,” Russell says, “despite how serious the moment is. And I think that is a huge part of our success.”
3. Mentality and adaptability distinguish great from good
The physical abilities of Olympic athletes are incredible, but Russell says they are not what distinguish the highest-performing athletes. Instead, he points to their drive to be the best, their willingness to consistently put in the necessary work, and their openness to feedback and change.
“Our lead athletes,” Russell says, “have this uncanny ability to make a change in a swimming motion right away — they actively seek the opportunity to make adjustments that make them better. They don’t need me to be on top of them and remind them.”
For example, while reviewing video after the 2015 swim season, Russell noted that freestyler Simone Manuel didn’t seem as mechanically efficient when she breathed to the right. At the 2015 World Championships, Simone had finished sixth in the 100-meter freestyle with a time of 53.93. During that race, she took 22 breaths — 19 to the right and three to the left. Simone and her coach, Greg Meehan, took Russell’s suggestion to heart and worked on her taking more breaths from the left side. At the 2016 Olympics, Simone won a gold medal in the 100 free with a time of 52.70, becoming the first African American woman to medal in swimming at the Olympics. She took 21 breaths — one to the right and 20 to the left.
This willingness to embrace continuous learning and improvement, to persevere through pain and fatigue, to serve as your own toughest taskmaster is, in a word, grit. And when you recruit for grit, whether you’re looking for swimmers or financial analysts or pastry chefs, you find people who will thrive no matter what their obstacles.
4. Preparation requires continually planning around talent, years ahead of the next big push
Strategic workforce planning is all the rage in the corporate world, given the technological, social, and economic shocks that contemporary businesses face. Due to competition and the long-term nature of developing athletes, USA Swimming actually started thinking about the team for next summer’s 2020 Tokyo Games in 2014 — before the last Olympics in Rio had even taken place. “We know that some of our best athletes at any point in time are going to retire by the time the next Olympics roll around,” Russell says. “And we have to figure out how we’re going to fill that gap.”
After the 2016 Olympics, Russell crunched the numbers and found that over the previous four Olympiads, only four U.S. swimmers had medaled in butterfly events compared with, say, 13 in the backstroke. And two mainstays of the stroke — Phelps and Dana Vollmer — were not likely to be around for the 2020 Olympics. So, with Russell’s numbers in front of them, USA Swimming launched the Butterfly Revolution, using social media, swim clinics, webinars, and other tools to boost interest in the stroke among swimmers across the United States. In 2017, just two U.S. swimmers medaled in the butterfly at either the worlds or world juniors; this year, the U.S. collected eight medals at those two meets.
Your company may not be facing a shortage of butterfliers but it may already be considering what pending retirements, business growth, and new technologies all mean for the makeup of your workforce in five to 10 years. If you don’t have the UX designers, cryptocurrency experts, or drone pilots you will need, you need to start developing a plan to make sure they’re in place when you do need them.
5. Everyone needs a break sometimes
The Olympics are an all-consuming passion for those who strive to get there. The leadership at USA Swimming acknowledges this, and Russell cites purposeful efforts to mitigate the inevitable “post-Olympic blues.”
“All of our Olympians go through that,” he says. “They’re real. You plan your entire life to achieve a goal as an athlete. Similarly, I have my entire professional life pointing toward this one moment. And then it passes. It’s our job as coaches and as a team to help athletes see past the Olympics.”
Companies, too, need to monitor and control for burnout, particularly among their top performers. One way to do that is to incorporate sabbaticals into your benefits portfolio. A growing number of highly regarded companies have adopted sabbaticals — an extended break, separate from paid vacation, awarded to employees who hit tenure milestones — as a way for employees to decompress and re-energize. Interestingly, this already happens occasionally in the world of Olympic swimming.
Michael Phelps, the most accomplished swimmer in history, “retired” after the 2012 Olympics. Phelps stayed away from competition for nearly two years and then returned to the pool. Two years later, he added five golds and a silver at the 2016 Summer Games. U.S. breaststroker Breeja Larson took a six-month break from swimming after the 2018 nationals to focus on her job . . . as an IT recruiter. She returned to the pool and won the 2019 nationals in the 100 breast.
Personally, Russell doesn’t know what he’ll do after the 2020 Games, but he knows it will be something to do with his away-from-the-pool passions of hiking and climbing. For the next year, he and the rest of USA Swimming are focused on bringing home Olympic medals from Tokyo — and having fun along the way.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Management Blog, 2019 by Chris Louie
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