We talk a lot about the poor quality of job postings with many just being a cut and paste version of the internal job description. However, we should also be talking about the poor quality of job descriptions themselves, many of which are put together in haste with little thought round impact and outcome.
To give us a different perspective, my guest this week is Kate Leto, a well-known product management and transformation consultant. As well as sharing her thoughts on job descriptions, Kate also offers insights on how thinking like a product manager could help improve the talent acquisition process.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is product management and what lessons might it have for talent acquisition
- The importance of recruiting for emotional intelligence
- Person organizational fit
- Using four simple questions to create effective job descriptions
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from jobico. Jobico provides the next generation job board software and AI enabled matching technology combining both the benefits of a scalable SaaS platform and the flexibility of a custom solution. With Jobico, businesses can reach a new level of quality and professionalism in online recruiting and can take advantage of the rapidly changing market. Jobico helps leading brands in 12 markets globally to engage talent and grow revenues with job boards. To find out more, go to www.jobico.com. that’s www.jobico.com and jobico is spelled J-O B I Q O.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 218 of the recruiting Future podcast. We talk a lot about the poor quality of job postings with many just being a cut and paste version of an internal job description. But we should also be talking about the poor quality of the job descriptions themselves. Many of are put together in haste with very little thought around their impact and eventual outcome. To give us a different perspective on this, my guest this week is Kate Leto, a well known product management and transformation consultant. As well as sharing her thoughts on job descriptions, Kate also offers insights on how thinking like a product manager could help improve the talent acquisition process. Hi Kate and welcome to the podcast.
Kate Leto [00:02:00]:
Hi Matt. Thank you. I’m very happy to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Kate Leto [00:02:08]:
Sure. My name is Kate Leto and I’m a product management and transformation consultant, which means a lot of different things, but one of the main things is that I work with product management organizations and teams to help them find different ways to become more, to become higher performing, to work better together, to change the way they’re working, to use some kind of basic discipline practices of product management to move their organizations along. And I work with companies of all shapes and sizes all over the world and it’s something I really enjoy.
Matt Alder [00:02:42]:
Fantastic stuff. So just for the benefit of the people in the audience who might not be fully up to speed with product management, could you just give us a sort of a very quick overview of what product management is?
Kate Leto [00:02:53]:
Yeah, that’s so funny. It’s kind of the 10 million pound question of what is product management? I’d say people within our, our product management community are still trying to come up with a definition that works for everyone because it’s a very broad type of profession. But at A high level. It’s product managers or people that work with kind of three different areas. So technology they work with. They try to build things that are really easy for people to use. So they have a great kind of usability factor and they try to keep that in mind. Building products that people want is something that a product manager is really focused on. And they also try to keep in mind kind of the business needs, the organizational overall goals and objectives. So they try to really. They serve as almost kind of like this glue or sometimes they say a pickle in the middle between technology, usability and business.
Matt Alder [00:03:48]:
So I saw you do an excellent presentation at Turing Fest a few months ago. Turing Fest is a technology conference that takes place in Edinburgh every summer. It’s actually one of my favorite events of the year, so I’d recommend that everyone goes in 2020. But you did a great presentation about improving hiring and thinking about emotional intelligence. Could you just give us a quick overview on your thoughts around emotional intelligence and why it is so important in hiring?
Kate Leto [00:04:19]:
Sure. So emotional intelligence has become an area and a space that I’m so interested and intrigued by. A few years ago, I had. I personally had some. I had kind of a bout of bad health, so I took some time off work and I started instead of going on kind of a great holiday or a yoga retreat like a lot of my friends and family said, I stayed home in my flat in London and I was trying to catch up on everything that was going on in the product world. So we have a lot of content out out there, lots of blogs, lots of opinions on how to do product management, the different tools and techniques. But what I realized is that no one was really talking about the behaviors associated with product management. And a lot of those are based on the space of emotional intelligence and our ability to kind of recognize, manage and understand our own emotions and recognize, understand and influence the emotions of others. And it’s things like self awareness and self management and conflict resolution even, and the ability to coach and mentor others and be adaptable. So all of these things I felt were missing from this conversation of product management. So I have spent a lot of time really kind of delving into emotional intelligence and learning much more about it through different kind of books and courses and coaching programs. And it’s something that I try to bring into the conversations with product organizations and product leaders because I think it’s a lot, a lot of times it’s something that we just missed. We don’t think about the behaviors associated with our work. We think about the Activities of our work, the what we do, not how we do it. So that’s where I’ve started to try to bring these two worlds of seemingly different but actually quite overlapping worlds of product management and emotional intelligence together. And this concept that I’ve named Product eq, and that’s what I was talking about at Turing, and how that can actually be applied even to our hiring processes. Because what from what I’ve seen in the product organizations I’ve worked with, and this isn’t just specific to product, you know, product is a place I play in and is a specialty and focus of mine. But this is quite universal and that people that are getting more involved in the hiring process as hiring managers or different members of teams involved in hiring don’t really have a lot of experience in hiring. And they tend to use some traditional tools or just things that they find online that don’t really hire for what? For a good fit within the organization. Instead, they might be looking to hire for pedigree or from a product perspective, from a certain type of experience with a certain technology or a certain customer. So what I was trying to do with that talk at TuringFest was kind of reframe that conversation and say, not only is product management about all these activities we do, but if we’re going to hire, we need to actually bring emotional intelligence much more into that conversation.
Matt Alder [00:07:19]:
Now I want to talk about that in detail in a second because I think that you’ve got some really, really insightful advice at how companies can get better at doing that and improve their hiring. Just before we do, though, what’s also interesting for me is how you can apply some of the disciplines of product management to. To hiring to improve it. Could you give us some thoughts on that?
Kate Leto [00:07:45]:
Yeah. So one of the baseline kind of fundamental philosophies, I guess you could say, within product management is that we’re always trying to learn. We have a very sort of, I guess you could say, experimental mindset in product management because we like to be able to learn if something’s going to work before maybe we ask a bunch of developers to go build it, or designers to go design it, or a business to invest in it. So we have developed kind of a, a focus on experimentation and learning from what we do. So one of the main disciplines I think that we could take from product management into hiring is this idea that it’s really a learning process and that as hiring managers, be it within product or elsewhere, even in more of an HR space, specifically can learn from what we’re doing. Take time after you brought somebody on board perhaps to actually have an open conversation around what worked with that hiring process and bringing that person in, what didn’t? And did we get it? Did we get it right? You know, what can we learn from that process? What can we change next time around? So I think in terms of borrowing from product discipline into the HR space, things like experimentation and the ability and desire to look back and reflect are a couple of things that would cross over.
Matt Alder [00:09:02]:
Well, one of the things that you were, that you were talking about was personal and organizational fit. And I think that’s something that would be really, really interesting to the recruiters and HR professionals who are listen to the show. Tell us a bit more about that.
Kate Leto [00:09:17]:
Yeah, so there’s a theory, it’s an organizational design theory called Person Organization fit theory. So it’s something that was developed and supported by people much smarter than me. But it’s something I’ve read about and thought is really interesting and applicable definitely to our product space and I’m sure wider. It’s this idea that if you, when you have an organization whose culture and values and goals and norms actually aligns with a person’s personality, attitudes, values and goals as well, you get a fit. You know, there is actually a fit. A lot of times we talk about cultural fit. Well, there’s research and data that shows you can actually reach that fit. And when you do have what they call PO fit or person organization fit, you see some really good things. You know, turnover rate goes down, productivity goes up. The desire to change and deal with change as many organizations are going through transformation and change programs, it’s something that, that the person and their team can actually respond to in a better way because they have this fit. So it’s, it’s an interesting concept that is something that I find within the product world. We talk about quite a bit when we’re hiring people. And I’m sure it’s a larger conversation as well, but it’s, I found it really fascinating that there is strong data and science behind the fact that this does actually exist. And if we can bring people on board that actually do align with an organization’s goals, values, norms and culture overall, then we can make some really cool things happen. We can help to create high performance teams and high performance organizations. It’s not just fantasy, there’s actually science behind it.
Matt Alder [00:11:02]:
And what would be your practical tips for people to achieve that with their hiring?
Kate Leto [00:11:09]:
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of things that you could focus on and this is where also the idea and concept of emotional intelligence comes into play I think, because I think if we start to look at some different ways of trying to or different kind of experiments, we can even bring into our hiring processes that involve looking for emotional intelligence to help us to get to fit, we might be onto something interesting. So for example, a lot of hiring that I see within the product world at least, we have a tendency to actually kind of create roles or job descriptions that don’t really reflect the needs or a potential fit within an organization. What I often see when somebody gets headcount approval, you know, they’ll go and start working on a job description. And working on a job description often means cutting and pasting the job description. You know, there’s a survey out there that I saw recently that said about 80% of hiring managers feel that the job description is important, but about 50% of us cut and paste that job description. So we don’t spend a lot of time and thought and actually putting together something that’s meaningful and could represent fit. So what I encourage is actually using something different. So instead of just taking this knee jerk reaction of going to build a job description that might have like a breakdown of must haves and nice to haves to actually answer for simple questions when you’re thinking about a new role. What’s the purpose of the role? What’s the role accountable for? So what’s the outcomes that role will be working towards? And then what are the, maybe the hard skills or the technical skills, the activities that that person, that role will have to do in order to reach their outcome? So in the product world, this could be putting together a roadmap or creating new metrics or introducing okrs or something like that. But then also answer a question around what are the behaviors this role is going to need to be able to display in order to be successful? And this is where the emotional intelligence part really comes out. If you do spend a little bit of time in learning what are the different capabilities of emotional intelligence, you can easily identify things like perhaps within a new role, this person might need to be really good at conflict resolution because maybe they’re going to join a team that’s had a lot of tension recently or has some really challenging stakeholders. So answering that question around what are the behaviors needed for the role, you can actually list out what are the different capabilities of emotional intelligence that this role will need to have to be successful. So I guess one of the first things I would say is just take a different look or shake up how you’re Actually creating a role or creating a new job description. And also maybe don’t do it on your own. If you answer these four questions, maybe the hiring manager can start it out. But I’ve also worked with a lot of organizations where we take that into a workshop setting and actually do that with build out, answer those four questions with stakeholders and other members of teams. So there’s more hands on, real time feedback into what this role really needs to be. So that’s one thing. And I’d also say going back to this concept of learning from the hiring process, there’s an idea around that I actually learned from a book I was reading about Jack Welch, of course, the CEO of ge. And he put a lot of emphasis on making good hiring decisions within his team. And he would actually incentivize his team to make good hiring decisions and take the process seriously by introducing this metric called the hiring batting average. So if you’re American or you know, American baseball, you might be familiar with the batting average. And this is kind of taken from that. And the idea is actually measuring how in his mind, how seriously or how well a person was approaching the hiring process from the internal perspective and were they making good decisions and reinforcing that with those retros that I mentioned earlier, taking opportunity to reflect back on whether or not they made the right decisions with hiring, but also if their process helped them get to the point where they were making the right decisions. So I think those are a few ways that you can start to actually bring emotional intelligence in. Also, you know, your audience might be familiar with behavioral interview questions. The product world, maybe not so much, but through behavioral interview questions, you can actually start to identify and make intangible things like emotional intelligence capabilities like conflict resolution more tangible. So within the product world, we work quite a bit about the questions that we ask in an interview and helping to make sure that they can actually help us understand how a person’s behaved in the past, because that’s a great predictor on how they could behave in the future in a work situation. Whereas a lot of times within the product world, now I see them just kind of, I see people who are getting ready to go interview candidates just doing quick Google searches for these crazy brain teaser questions and thinking that that’s going to help them understand if this person’s actually a good fit, where that’s in my mind, kind of a waste of time. So those are just a few different ways that you can start to bring in EQ and emotional intelligence into your hiring process and hopefully start working towards achieving fitness.
Matt Alder [00:16:40]:
Kate, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kate Leto [00:16:42]:
Thank you Matt. It was a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:16:44]:
My thanks to Kate Leto. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The podcast also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also find the show there. And don’t forget, you can follow the show on Instagram by searching for Recruiting Future. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join.
