Deception #16 Done It Before - Work Experience

What's keeping you from using your strengths in the work place? Many job searchers are fixating on what they have done in the past and not on their greatest potential. To be fair employers share a lot of the blame on this point.

I spent the week with a gentleman who works as an HR Professional for one of the countries largest and well-known financial service companies. He is frustrated with his own companies reluctance to "In-Source", to look for talent within the organization. The focus on work history can be so debilitating to employee and employer alike costing both in terms of economic growth.

I’ll get help from Marcus Buckingham along with Co-Author Curt Coffman on this one from their management book, First Break All The Rules. This book is based on Gallop interviews with over 80,000 managers in over 400 companies. Buckingham and Coffman comment on the ill-advised strategy of managers who select base solely on experience:

“Manager’s who place a special emphasis on experience pay closest attention to a candidates work history. They pore over each person’s resume, rating the companies who employed him and the kind of work they performed. They see his past as a window to the future.”

Buckingham and Coffman agree that experience can teach valuable lessons… but it fails to take into account the many kinds of talents required to get a job done. Conventional wisdom often suggests that somehow managers can teach talent, or at least teach skills that might somehow make up for talent.

From my perspective in managing for several years in a well known national company, this is acerbated by the fact that few organizations prepare their managers with tools that give any kind of a window into a perspective applicants actual natural talents. Work sampling would be one possibility. Having an applicant perform same or similar task simulations would be one way to get additional helpful insight. Talent oriented interviewing strategies would be another.

Strengths Oriented Interviewing is on the rise in most Western Countries. Marcus Buckingham’s Strong Manager Program teaches a whole recruiting strategy including how to build an ad and how to conduct an interview designed to uncover underlying natural talent and strengths. Many top companies are doing this including Google, Facebook and Accenture. Earnst & Young has a set of recruiting pages devoted to recruiting strengths. You can see them here:

http://ukstudentstories.ey.com/yourstrengths/default.shtml

Scroll down in the left column of this blog and find sections titled “Strengths-Based Recruiting” and “Strengths-Based Interviewing” if you’d like to get a better sense of what’s happening out there.

John Wooden was perhaps the greatest basketball coach of all-time…arguably the greatest sports coach of all-time. Wooden said, “I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.”

Amen.