Mr. Adler. Hello. Hi honey. How are you? Very nice to meet you. I'm fine. Nice to meet you as well. Oh, I could never imagine this scenario. You know, you uh delivering webinar uh at Magnus. This is an honor for us. Thanks for joining. Thank you very much. Well, at at my age of 79, I'm happy to talk to young people everywhere around the world. So, I appreciate the opportunity as well. Oh, thank you. How is your day? Where are you currently located? I am in California and my day is starting with you folks. Oh, that's great. It's great. By the way, back then I I've known that you have trained around 70,000 recruiters. Is this the right number? Well, I would say it's not just recruiters, it's hiring managers and recruiters. And I would say, yeah, more hiring managers than recruiters. So, obviously, there are more hiring managers than recruiters, but u So, I'd say it's probably 5 to one or six to one recruiters to hiring hiring managers to recruiters. Oh, that's that's great. That's great. and and uh I would like to represent you to our uh to our like attendance whoever is joining and I will mention this number okay because it's huge it's huge what's huge but also remember that I've been around for a long long long time so so when you divide it when you divide it by 30 or 40 years it's not every it's not many every year so No, but it's still an achievement I would say. Do you know how I'm bringing you as an example during our courses? I'm telling there is someone whose name is there from 15 years ago until now. So whenever you tell me that whenever we tell to ourselves like we are done we have learned everything then please go to Lu Adler's LinkedIn profile and you will see like the amount of job he's doing and it's a magic how you can be there like on the front throughout years never yeah you're you're never done and anybody thinks they're done uh well I remember in 1990 when the internet just came out and people said I finished the internet so it's very similar keeps on growing point. Exactly. Same with AI, right? Mhm. Always place to grow. Yeah. Okay. As our attendees are joining, uh I want to just a couple of words to greet everyone and then I will give the whole stage to you Mr. Adler. Hello everyone. I'm seeing many familiar names and surnames here. Very thank you that you have joined today for us. I'm just telling the same to Mr. Adler that for us it's a real honor to welcome him at Magnus. Let me shortly introduce myself. My name is Ani. I'm the founding CEO of Magnus HR. What we do? We provide HR and recruitment services 80% in Armenia and 20 to 30% uh globally. Mainly our focus is on tech and Europe. And under Magnus HR now you see the team here we have HR Edu hub and our HR headops president is Ellis actually she's the hero behind this event. Uh the idea of HR do all is to build a really comprehensive HR ecosystem here in Armenia. HR education ecosystem here in Armenia and we are doing these sessions quite often uh on a monthly basis and we are extremely happy that Mr. Adler agreed to join this time. I will share a couple of notes about him and then maybe Miss Adler you can tell more about you for whoever who doesn't know about you but I think everyone knows you very well. So uh Mr. Adler is CEO and founder of the Adler group, a consulting and training company that helps businesses, many businesses to improve their hiring through uh performance-based hiring system. And this is copyrighted system of yours, right? Uh this is totally Yeah. Mhm. And uh as you'll see, Michelle the Adler enjoys sharing his experience and he it's like years of training, lots of hiring managers and lots of recruiters. And also he's the author of our we call it our recruitment bible. Wait, I will find the book on my tablet to show you. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, where is I have to see this. Yeah, have to see it. I found it here. Okay. That's that one there. Yeah. So, this book is like our recruitment bible from day one. I have learned with so much so much from here and it's still very actual and I have many questions. uh today for you but sure if we manage in time so shortly again thank you thank you everyone who have joined I think we will remember this this webinar for for years you know this is a very big moment for all of us well thank you that nice introduction so are we are we ready to go is that is this our time to go now okay I I assume the shaking of the head. Yes. Is the same as it is in America. Yes, I I understand that. Uh so let me kind of preise uh preface this conversation with the idea that feel free to ask questions throughout the program. Uh I might be able to see them because they're kind of over here right there. Uh but if I don't maybe Anie or somebody can read them and maybe wave your hand if you want to ask a question if it's because I'd rather a answer the questions when the point is raised rather than waiting to the end but we'll have time at the end to do it as well. U so yes I've been around a very very long time. Uh and I actually retired three years or so ago. Uh I said this is hard work. Hiring good people is hard hard work and not many hiring managers really want to do it and not many candidates really want to take the time to make the best career decisions. Most people from the candidate side are more interested in getting a paycheck. Uh and as long as a job is reasonable, they're okay. Hiring managers, on the other hand, want to fill the job as quickly as possible. So, a lot of the decision making that companies and candidates make alike is based on pressure or pain. I've got to fill this job. I have too much work to do. Candidate, I've got to get back on the payroll. I've got to do this. I've got to make the mortgage payment or the car payment. And all of those are legitimate pain points. Unfortunately, and this is what I tell candidates and I've told them year after year, don't make short-term long short-term decisions b long don't excuse me. Restate that because this is important. Don't make long-term decisions using short-term data. That's hard to do when you have to make a payment. It's hard to do when you have to work overtime if you're a manager because you don't have somebody there. But if you can pull that off, it's will change your life almost by being able to do that. And I don't want to say it's easy. I as a recruiter try to orchestrate that process. And I've been doing that orchestrating that process since 1978, probably before your parents were born. But I didn't start working in industry in 1978. I started in 1968. and I was in engineering and I was in manufacturing and I worked on guided missile systems and I worked on uh handheld calculators. I worked on automotive parts. So I worked in a lot of different situations. I left industry just because I didn't like the boss. I quit four times quit uh and then I became a recruiter which seems kind of stupid but it and sometimes in retrospect it does seem stupid to me too but that's it's what happened. But I realized that hiring could be a business process because I had been in business for 10 years and I'd manage manufacturing systems and business systems. So a lot of what I'm going to talk about today is this business level thinking and I assume most people here are in HR. And if I had to say anything for HR, you have to think like a business person, not like an HR person. I know that sounds odd, but it's critical. You got to see the whole picture. You got to zoom out and say, "How does this affect the business? How does this affect the company? How does this affect the people I'm hiring?" And too many people in HR are riskaverse. I don't want to do that. I don't want to uh break break anything. No, sometimes you need to break things because they're not working perfectly. So, let me kind of talk about that's what we're going to talk about today. Let me go through the quick agenda and let me also apologize uh ahead of time. I get excited about this stuff and when I get excited I talk fast and when English isn't your first language it's hard for it's even hard for me to understand uh but it's got to be even harder for you to understand so slow make me slow down make me ask questions and that will be helpful uh so it's important and and just to give you another sense I was born in the New York City area and in New York City they talk two to three times faster than everybody else in the world. So, just be careful about that. But here's what I want to talk about today. I want to give you an overview of this business process called performance-based hiring. I also want to teach you a new game to play. It's called Moneyball for HR. We're going to change the rules of how we hire people. And you, if you want to make progress, you have to change the rules. Uh, and this is sometimes hard for HR to do, but if you want to be a leader, you have to do things differently. part of doing different things differently is this hiring formula for success. In fact, I'll start pretty much with that because I promised Liz that that's what I would do, but it's at the core of everything we do. Uh we'll measure quality of hire. Uh and you can almost look at it from a candidate side as well as the company side or the hiring manager side. And then we'll have Q&A and I'm going to give away some pretty cool tools. Uh but you got to wait till the end to get those. Excuse me. And just so you know, it's it's morning here in California. Uh a little bit after 8:00, so this was coffee. So, and feel free to ask question. Yes, I will. Uh so, you are okay if I sometimes interrupt you and uh deliver the questions from our participants. Right. You are okay with this question? I think you can if you want. You know, there's a way to raise your hand and raise your hand. Okay, great. No, I think there's a button you can push. Uh I was at a meeting yesterday where the yellow hand comes flying out of your picture. So, it's pretty hard to miss the yellow hand waving hand. So, whatever you want, just interrupt, but that would be great. You already have a question. No, no, no. I was just going to tell that English is perfect. We understand 100%. So, don't worry about that and and feel free to enjoy your coffee. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So, here's the hiring formula for success. This took me 10 years to develop this formula. 10 years to develop this formula. But the formula is correct. In fact, I work with folks at Harvard University to validate that this formula is correct. It's the formula for human performance. And it basically says ability to do the work in relationship to the fit. And the fit is fit with the job. Do I want to do this work? Fit with the company. Do I like this company? Do I like this pe? Do the people I work with? Ability to do the work in relationship to fit drives motivation. And because motivation is so important, we raise it to the an exponential power. And if and that equals results and sometimes if you're not motivated, and I think we all felt that we have people who are not motivated, they could be perfectly capable, but they don't like the situation, so they don't work hard. On the other hand, we find people who are above average ability who just are motivated by the work get have extraordinary results. And it was the idea that if you find a job that motivates you, you can be a superstar. So the idea is let's find jobs that you can be a superstar. Technical ability and let me dig deep a little bit. Ability is just your raw technical ability. What do you what are you capable of? Can you work with teams and manage teams? Can you organize your work? Can you project it out and get it done on time? Can you solve jobrelated problems? Can you influence people and work with people? That's ability. And quite frankly, not easy to measure, but not hard to measure either. Give people tests, you talk to them, you have them take exams and stuff. You can figure out most of those things pretty easily. What's hard to measure is the fit factors. So again, it's ability in relationship to fit. Does a candidate really want to do that work? I mean, I remember talking with someone probably 30 years ago uh and he was a PhD in chemistry and he came to me. He says, "Everybody says I'm overqualified for this job." And I said, "What was the job?" And he told described it and I said, "When was the last time you did that work?" He said, "About 10 years ago." So I said, "You are overqualified. You're not motivated to do it. You're capable of doing it, but you haven't done it for years. it isn't what you naturally do uh uh when you're because you just love it. He said, "Okay." But he they didn't define it that way. When I told him that way, he said, "Yes, you're right. I am overqualified for that job." The pay so you got to be do I does this candidate really want to do that work at this point in time in that situation. And the situation is the company, it's the team, the pace of the company. I'm working with a company now in the Chicago area, but works worldwide on designing using the latest state-of-the-art design tools on building uh big buildings, big commercial buildings, office buildings. And they have and these design tools lay out the the highway system, the plumbing system, the electrical system, the grid system, the power system, and then the building itself. And this company is using state-of-the-art tools. But if you're a design engineer and using old style design tools that aren't AI invested, you know, they just people don't want to do that. So, it's the pace of the company, the tools you have, the culture of the company, and most important of all, the manager you work for. I literally, and I'm going back 35, 45 years, I worked at a company. I loved the job. I was running a small company making automotive components. the whole company. I didn't like the group president and he and I argued every time he came down to my plant. I just said, "No, I don't want you here." I was 32 years old and we argued and I quit four times. His boss then asked me to come back. Then I said, "I can't do it anymore. I love the work, but I didn't like him. So, it just got me out of business and that's why I'm doing this and if if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be here talking to you today." I mean, it's that why I left. So all the fit factors are very very important. Another thing that happens when you hire people, how many times, let me ask you this question. Maybe just put a percent down in the chat area. Um, how many people do you think when they first take a job, so they get a job offer and they start on it work, what percent of the people actually know exactly that work before they start? Or how many are surprised? Oh, I didn't know that was a job. How what percent does that happen? Just put that in chat. I mean, just get an idea. Um% of the people who take a job aren't sure what the job is when they are disappointed. Yeah. I think it's I think it's I think I mean in America it's probably over 60 70%. Oh I didn't I thought that was the job but it's not exactly the job. So it's a lot of people are surprised and that causes people to be disappointed. Let's keep on going. So, it's ability and relationship to fit drives motivation and it's motivation to do the job, not to get the job. So, I was on a phone call last week with 12 managers and they said, "We love people who are prepared or on time to get it done, do all the homework, and we don't like people who u are late or haven't really studied our company." And I said, "That's nothing to do. That's a motivation to get the job. That's nothing if they want the job." Now, I would say that once they know what the job is, and if they're they don't take that time, that's a a signal. But for the first meeting, it's not the signal. It's that they want to get the job. And you got to be able to separate motivation to do the actual work that equals results. No excuses, just get it done. So, here's the whole formula. uh I'm not going to repeat it word for word but it's the ability to do the work in relation it drives motivation because motivation is so important we raise it to a a power and if a person's just slightly motivated to do the work they'll be average if they're if they're not motivated to do that work they'll be below average and if they're highly motivated to do that work they'll be above average as long as they're reasonably competent now I will say that In the years I've been a recruiter, there was one there was a caveat to this. We placed somebody in who was not competent but highly motivated. And they fired him in two weeks. They broke everything. Uh he he was going around. He was incomp. So if you're incompetent, you want a lazy person. If you have to hire an incompetent person, make sure he doesn't do anything. Just put him in a corner and don't let him do any work. That was a joke. A United States joke or a European joke. Not a very good one, but you'll get it to tomorrow morning. You'll see. Oh, that was actually funny. Sorry. Okay, so here's the idea. The drivers of success are not skills. They're situations. I don't want to minimize the the need to assess ability. That can be done. I'll give you some ideas on how to do it. What's hard to do is the situation. Can this person work in this job in this set of circumstances at this pace with this manager with these tools and with this team? Most people ignore that part. And yet that's the critical part of driving motivation. So let me just ask you this question. Does that sound right to you? Does it seem logical or is it seem off base? Anybody have a comment on that? You don't have to, but you can say it. I think that's uh I've read it in your book. This is not my idea. This is actually is coming from your book. But it's not the uh check mark in the list better rather than the mix of the skills. Like if maybe someone doesn't have the whole list, but they still able to do the job. So I would say if we are speaking about single and very how to say plain list of the skills here, that doesn't matter. But but we are if we are talking about a very specific mix of the skills which gives the ability to do the job right then here it matters. So the key word for me is like mix of the skills rather than pain and check. We're going to change that idea a little bit on how we identify that. But let me kind of just let's kind of go forward. But it's a good excellent point. U so I want to show you how to both measurability and the fit factors. To me you get those two right you're in the game. So, this is where you need to play moneyball for HR. Uh, what I've discovered over the years that some of the best people in the world have non-traditional backgrounds. And I don't know if you're familiar with the term moneyball uh because there was a book that came out about 10 years ago about a US baseball team where uh they didn't look at traditional skills. They looked at different kind of metrics to measure people and it found out that a lot of the best baseball players uh did things differently than what everybody thought they were because they looked at the data. Well, Moneyball for HR is similar to that. There are some great people, people who get promoted faster, people who learn faster. And even this company that I was mentioning about designing state-of-the-art buildings and infrastructure systems, they find people who've designed other kinds of products not in that industry using similar technology but not the same technology are superior. So it was turns out if they just box check the skills, they wouldn't have found those people. So they had to change how they found them. Sometimes these people grow faster, get promoted faster. Uh, so there a way to find people in an unusual way that doesn't involve checking skills. That's moneyball for HR. And I want to give you some ideas on how we can implement that. But first, I want to go well, here's the the big idea. I want to give you an overview of performance-based hiring. Some of you already know it, but when I started this talk, I said performance-based hiring is a business process. And the business process is unusual because what we're looking for is not hiring a person to start to fill a job. We're offering someone what we call a win-win hiring opportunity. A win-win hiring opportunity means the person is successful on the first year anniversary date. So, if I hire a person and we and they start, let's assume uh they start September 1st, September 1st, 2026. We talk to that person. What do you think of that job? Oh, I'm still happy. I love it. And you talk to the hiring manager. What do you think of that person? Ah, great person. That's called win-win hiring. Thinking long term, not and what somebody told me that last week, they said most companies hire generic people for generic jobs. I thought that was a great quote. They hired generic people, got all these skills, they give them a standard job, they get there, they don't like the job or the situation. We're changing that. Performance-based hiring is a business process and it involves these steps. And I'm going to go back a little bit to tell you about my first hiring project as a recruiter was in 1978. It was for a plant manager making automotive components. And the president of the company asked me, uh, hey, I need someone with 10 years experience, maybe 15. Has to have an engineering degree. Has to have at least five to 10 years in automotive producing machines this way. The same kind of equipment, the same kind of layout, the same I mean, and I and I looked at the president of this company and I still talk to him every now and then. I say, "Mike, that is not a job description. That is a person description. What do you want the person to do? He said, 'Oh, that's a weird question. I said, I want somebody to turn around the manufacturing plant because it's losing money. So, I said, let's walk through. It was right around the building. So, we walked through the plant. Spent an hour and a half walking through the plant. It was a crummy, dirty plant. Material was laid out wrong. Machinery was laid out wrong. People, some people were working hard. Some people weren't working at all. So, we said, "We got to fix this. Got to fix that." We found seven things that would turn their plan around. That became our performance-based job description. Hired someone 3 weeks, did it 6 months later exactly as planned. That's step one. Define the work that a person needs to do, not the skills that a person needs to do. In this case, and we call them KPOS's, key performance objectives or another term is called objectives and key results. We define the actual work that needs to be done. We focus on what a person needs to do, not what they need to have. Now, from a recruiter standpoint, we got to find people who can do that work. And we we my whole focus is I don't spend a lot of time talking to everybody who applies. I don't even want people to apply to a job. I look I pre-qualify everybody. We call them semi- finalists. A semi- finalist can do that work. They can't do the work. Why do you want to hire them? Uh number two, I they have been recognized for doing that work. They've been promoted faster. They gave a talk at some conference. They wrote a white paper. It's on the internet. They did something. Could be on GitHub if it's a technical. But good people are visible once you find their name. I mean, they do stuff uh just like uh you folks uh raised this uh webcast. Well, a lot of people got involved with so a lot of people who organize this webcast are visible and you guys who run this webcast know other good people. So if I was talking with Annie, I need a good person for this and that. Now I can get a referral. So but a semi- finalist meets two conditions. Number one, they have to be able to do the work and they have to be formally recognized for it. The reason for that is you've got to convince a hiring manager to see that person formally wound unless they box check the skills. So when you take the assignment as a recruiter, I say to the hiring manager, if a person can do this work and I've been recognized, would you at least talk to them? Zoom call, quick call. You got to get yes to that. Now you've changed the criteria that a hiring manager is going to use to see a person. It's not box checking skills. No. Can they do the work? That's huge when as a recruiter. And I would say so I'm I'm on this phone call last week with this company because just talked to them. Uh about 4 or 500 people work around the world. Malaysia, Singapore, India. I mean, if if you're in the building trade, if you're building a big commercial building, this company's involved. Once I told her that, she said, and it was a president of the company was on the call. She said, "We're going to do it." I said, "Don't let another rep be approved unless you have the performance objectives figured out." She totally agreed. We're now implementing that process. It's so logical that you have to know the work, but most people don't. So, to me, this is where HR can be a leader. You just you can't take a search assignment without knowing the job. The other half of semi- finalists when you reach out to a candidate the candidate has to see that job as a career move not just a lateral transfer. So part of it is we say would you be so we tell candidate would you be open to explore something that looks like a good career move? Let's just have a conversation. So it's very conversational two-way. So that's step two. Step three is we assess the candidate. And I'll show you basically what we do is we ask candidates to give us examples of work they've done on most related. I'll give you a quick example in a minute. But step three is the interview. Then we got to close the candidate. And personally I just to give you a sense I've personally been involved and I haven't done much in the last 10 years but the 30 years prior to that I probably personally handled beginning to end 6 to 700 different search assignments from engineers, managers, directors, vice presidents and general managers and presidents. You always have to close the deal and I assume we have a lot of recruiters on this call or HR people. If you can't close the deal within your budget and everything's been up to that's been a waste of time. So you got to close. This is the deal. You got it. So I cherrypick who I think would obviously take this job and thrive if they do it. So a lot of work to get to that. Then you have to on board people and we have now we have let's just say this we have AI tools that do a lot of the heavy lifting here. But the hightouch part is where a person still has to be involved. uh in in America I think and I don't know how advanced you are from technology standpoint in Armenia but things are changing rapidly almost overnight here in what's going on and and I tell you when I said I retired about 3 years ago when AI came in I said this is a game changer this is going to change the world and how people get hired uh probably changing faster than I think I mean every day you hear about something new comes out so pretty interesting. Nonetheless, u on boarding is critical. So we we actually can create a our tools can actually create a custom onboarding system for this. We can look at the work. We can look at the candidate. We can assess the candidate's strengths and weaknesses and we can create a 6090 or 30 60 90day on boarding plan to ensure that candidate successful on the job. And then we can shift it. We got to deliver on the promise and we achieve that. we get uh uh we get a win-win hiring outcome. So our northstar is win-win hiring. The methodology to put it together is money ball for HR. You got to break the work down in a different way. Performance-based hiring is the business process that puts that all together. And I'm I've got some a lot of other stuff I want to talk about, but does this make sense to everybody? What are your thoughts, comments, or questions? Got to have I got to have two questions right now. So I can't go forward until we have two questions. So uh and Annie, you can't ask. It's got to be somebody from the group. Yeah. For me, the first one when you were telling all of this, the first thing I was thinking about is about the resistance from executives. The situation that you were telling me about like we look for someone who's very well prepared. I faced the same and from the CEO himself. So it was sea level himself. So it's sometimes it's really difficult to kind of communicate this and to change the approach because honestly you cannot do this alone. This is investment from from the hiring manager side from the like decision maker side. What what is your both advice in these situations? Oh no that's the hardest part is step one uh to get the manager to think oh what is the work? So couple things that I say to a hiring manager. Uh hold on one second. I hope I don't lose you, but my monitor has decided to do something different. We're good. We're back to back to where we're supposed to be. Uh it kind of rises by itself, which is kind of odd. Uh nonetheless, u so even when I did this first assignment in 1978, that company president instantly said, "Oh, yeah, you're right. I want someone to turn around the plant." So what I tell to hiring managers, so let's assume I'm talking about hiring managers. I want someone with 10 years of this, a degree here, went to this school, sounds like this, prepared. And I just asked the hiring manager, when are you going to tell the candidate the work they need to be done? When are you going to tell them? You going to tell them during the interview? You going to tell them after the interview? He said, well, I'll tell them sometime. I said, why don't you tell me first so then I can find people who want to do that work. Okay, it makes logical sense. So that's number one. Number two, I said, "Think about the people whom you've hired. Who do you spend more time with? The good people or the people who you shouldn't have hired the below average people." What do you think they say? No. Below average, one because they spend more time on teaching, right? Yeah. Right. So, so I said, "So, you actually waste your time by hiring people who aren't motivated to do this work. Wouldn't it be better to hire people for your to spend time hiring your best people?" And I said all you have to do is tell me what the job is. So, so that was the first case. If we have a moment here, I can now create these instantly. Any job, any job in the world. Uh, so to give you an example, a week ago, maybe two weeks ago, uh, I have a friend of mine who was my old client. He's sold his company and made quite a bit of money. He's now giving it all to charities. one charity is an abused woman hotline in Southern California. So he said, "Lou, would you they're having trouble hiring people to man the hotlines. Would you help them?" And I said, "Pro bono?" I said, "Happy to do it." So I talked to the the head of that group. I said, "Tell me a little bit about that job." And it was they have to be on call 24/7. They have to be able to understand the crisis situation and they have to be able to not only diffuse it but also uh do things to and as a woman who's being abused obviously the husband could be there obviously very serious situation um and they have support services they know if they got to call the police immediately I mean it's a high stress situation u and I just asked our GPT which is our AI system with just that line I said I I have someone who's uh needs to hire people to man a abused woman hotline. It came back exactly what it should be. And then they said, "Give me an interview scorecard." It came back instantly. It then said, "Um, here's the here's how you assess the person." I mean, it was this is like 3 to five minutes and I'm on the phone with the head of this. It was a woman obviously. I'm on the phone with this woman and I we were both blown away. I said, "Mariela, I'm surprised this." So, I met this fellow yesterday for breakfast. Was it yesterday? Maybe Tuesday. I don't I can't remember what day is today. Nonetheless, I met him uh on Tuesday for breakfast. He said I read that I read the report is unbelievable. So, I think AI can do a lot of this work, but typically Annie, that was getting a manager to buy into that was hard. That's why I quit. It's not hard any longer. It's still hard to hire and do all this other stuff, but the real heavy lifting and the job and the step one is really the job analysis. Uh, and if I mean, just think about this. If you're a recruiter and you're trying to change someone's life, if you don't know the job, that's not fair. If you're a hiring manager and you're giving someone a job and you don't tell them what the job is, that's not fair. But you really think about what the world's best managers do is they understand the work and they put the people who want to be motivated to do that work. So that's the core of it. Let's go through some other stuff. These are all important questions, but here's basically the thing that I say. So, let me kind of define the whole package and we'll kind of dig deep a little bit. So, my point is define the job before defining the purpose. Define success, not skills. That's a typical job description. Got skills, experience, competencies, must have academics, got to be prepared on all this other stuff. Oh, now we got to have more skills. No. Uh so what I do is I say let's put the skills in the parking lot. What do you want the person to do? And it's always five or six performance objectives. Okay, you're going to hire a sales team and you got to build an uh train the sales team to uh sell widgets. We're going to launch a new product based on AI and manufacturing and industrial valves. Fine. You got to do in nine months. You got to go through the factory and reduce cost by 8% in the next year. you got to upgrade our new app design to incorporate uh notebooks LM and AI including with Gemini and with chat GPT whatever uh but it's always about work that they need to do and it's always you define the task you define the action you define the result and here's the interesting piece just because someone has all the skills doesn't mean they're motivated to do the work I mean a lot of you have lots of skills but you don't want to do just because you have the skills, you don't want to necessarily do them. I mean, I learned accounting and I could close a set of books. I It was boring. I didn't want to do it just because I was capable of doing it. Uh, on the other hand, here's what's interesting. If they can do the work in your situation, they'll have exactly the skills they need. Exactly. Hey, they want to do that work. I don't know. So, some president of a company asked me this question. How much experience does a person need to have to do this job? like I don't know they have to have enough to do it. Some people need five years, some need 10, some need one year, some need 30 years. That's the variable is the level of skills. The fixed thing is they got to do the work. And I think we think the skills are fixed. No, the the skills are variable based on how good the person is. A smart capable person needs less. A below average person needs more. So what do you want? More skills. And the best people have can learn faster. So even with this construction company, in fact, they then said when I said it, somebody else had a call, oh yeah, I remember this guy Chris, he didn't have any of the skills, but he he could learn anything quickly and he gave examples of it. So he learned something in a totally different field and he's their best person, the best designer now. So it's a lot of it has to do is so what what I would say is a great hire is the person can do the work. A perfect candidate has all the skills. But a great hire. So the var too many people think the job description stuff is fixed and they box check all that. No, make sure the person can do is competent and motivated to do the work. This is the big shift. This is the leadership thing that HR needs to do. You got to get off that. You got to think about what's the outcome. So what drives success is the work. The dependent variable, we'll get into a little bit of math. The independent variable is the work. The dependent varrow means hey it's a dependent on the work how smart the capable person is. So why anybody would want someone who's got less skills but can do the work because that's the high achiever. That's the top half. They learn faster. They get assigned projects. They take they volunteer for stuff that's over their head and they learn more. So this took me a long time to figure out 10 years probably when I started and I was stuck in traffic in Los Angeles. I live in Southern California and I was stuck there and I just saw a client and all of a sudden it hit me. It's what people do with what they have that makes them successful, not what they have. What people do with what they have. So what I do when I conduct an interview, I just say, "Let's go through your work history. Let me find out what you have." Then I look for people, what do you accomplish? So if I find someone three to four years who's accomplished 10 years worth of work, that's a good person. If I find someone with 10 years worth of work and they're doing five or 10 years experience but only doing five years worth of work of work, that's an average person. That's where we get the math of hiring. But to me, this chart, I mean, I was to me it's profound because it took 10 10 years to figure it out. But that's the deal. It's what you people do with what they have that makes them successful, not what they have. So, let me kind of go through the process and we can open I have got a few other things I want to show you, but you'll get the sense of it. So here's our whole interviewing process. We're going to assess what people do, not what they have. And if they can do the work, they have exactly the mix of skills. So when I talk to a hiring manager, I say, "Okay, what are you looking for?" And he said, "Skills, experience, and competency." So I say, "That's not a per That's not a job description. That's a person description." Let's put the job description in the parking lot and define Let's put the person description in the parking lot. us define the work first. What do you want the person to do? Then I say, if I can find a person who can do that work and is exceptional at it, but has a different mix of skills and experience, would you still see the person? Most managers say yes. And if they say no, I said, "Okay, here's what I'll do. I'll find people have all the skills. I'll find a couple people who can do the work, and you compare whom you want to hire." When I do that, they say all 100% of the time it's the person going to do the work. It's it's but it's extra work for me as a recruiter to do it. But most managers once you define the work, they say, "Oh, yeah, it makes sense." It's once they see it, yeah, of course. It's like, "Oh, yeah, duh. I hadn't thought of that before." So, it turns out, but you as a recruiter or an HR person have to convince them uh to make this shift, and it's not an it's not an insignificant shift. It's huge in terms of the results you get. So step one is we define work as a series of performance objectives. KPOs are key performance objectives or objectives and results. That's other terms you can look up. We then conduct a work history review of the candidate when we're interviewing that person. Go through your what job you have, what kind of work are you doing, uh why did you change jobs, have you been promoted, did you get recognized for anything? So we conduct a work history review to see if there's a fit. We then ask what we call the most significant accomplishment question. Hey, one of the big things you have to do in this project is launch a new project over the next six months. Tell me what you've accomplished like that. Another thing you have to do is we got to reduce operating cost by 5% uh in this business process. What have you done related to that? So, we just have the person tell us what they've accomplished with each of those uh accomplishments and we spend five or 10 or 15 minutes on each one. So most of the work is digging into that. We then might ask a problem-solving question which and I'll I want to state this loudly. It is not a hypothetical. It is a real problem this person might face on the job. Hey, we've got to get this project uh launched uh for this new system we're building, but it has to be done in six months. Normally, it would take nine months to do it. So, we're under the pressure to do it. if you were to get this job, how would you do this? So, you want to get into the person figuring out if they even understand how to attack the problem. It's very interesting. Uh, but it cannot be a hypothetical. It has to be a realistic problem and it's a give and take discussion to see if the person just has good problem solving skills. I don't want to get into that. If you buy Annie's the the book that Annie has or you buy one, it'll show you the whole thing. U, but that's the idea we have here. And AI can do a lot of this stuff for you now. I mean, you can create the interviews. You even what we're doing now is we're taking transcript of the interviews, uploading them uh with a performance-based job description and seeing, hey, does a candidate meet that criteria for the job. So, AI can do a lot of the assessment here. Uh, but you have to define the job. If you don't define the job, it's you got you're measuring against wind and air and hot air. So, let me kind of talk. This is the last thing I want to talk about plus Q&A. So, we'll do that. So, now this is the when Annie you said, "How do you get a hiring manager to uh to agree to this?" So, I'm going to go back to 1990. Um, and I started talking with hiring managers. And Annie, just for everyone else, when before this program started earlier, an hour or so ago, Annie asked me, uh, you've you've trained 90,000 or 70,000 recruiters. And I said, "No, probably 10,000 recruiters, but 60,000 hiring managers." So, it was us training hiring managers. Once I as a recruiter started doing this work defining the work as performance objectives uh their company said hey can you train all our managers I started training recruiters 10 years later it was more hey we're training hiring managers to do it right and I was a recruiter so they'd always give me search assignments so it was kind of an interesting marketing idea but when I started a program with hiring managers this is how I started a program so imagine I got 30 hiring managers in a room now on a Zoom I say to this question, the goal of this course is to measure quality of hire to improve your hiring results. But I want to ask you here, I said at the end of this program, uh we're going to show you how to um score a candidate, but I want to ask you a few questions to begin. So you got to remember this is at in the morning they're going through this class, three-hour class. I said, "Would you, the Millie talking to hiring managers, see a candidate who has a track record of doing work similar to what you need done?" I just asked that question. And they said, "Okay, I guess." They kind of shake their head. I said, "Well, let me add a little criteria to it. What if they've solved difficult problems just like you need done and have a track record of similar results?" They said, "Oh, yeah. I guess I I do that." They're a little bit more positive. I said, "Well, let me add another thing to it. What if they've been recognized for being in the top quartile of their peer group? They've written papers about it. They coach people about it. They train people about it. They've spoken at some conference or uh they got a blog or they run GitHub to do it. Oh yeah, we they're definitely if they're that good. Yeah, we'd see them. So, we're not done yet. Uh what about if they not only have all that, but they're also good at managing and building teams and working collaborative teams. Oh, yeah. We definitely want to hire those people. No question. I mean, they're good and they're excited. I said, 'But let's be frank. What if that person had a different mix of skills and experience on your job description, but could still do all of that work? Would you throw away? Would you give some relief on the skills? And they stopped and I, oh yeah, I guess we would. Yeah, you're probably right. We would definitely want to hire people who could do the work. And I said, these are top 25% people. I got to tell you something else here. We got a problem. If they don't fit with you, your style, and don't fit with your culture, company, they're not going to be as good. So, we got to assess that as well. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll we'll assess that. And they got to be motivated to do the work you want done. So, you got to tell me what this work is. Oh, okay. We'll tell you. And say, let me say this again. So, me talking to 30 hiring managers. These are people can do the work. They've been recognized for doing exceptionally well. They'll raise your talent bar. You'll be a They'll be able to change things. you need to manage them as hard. Uh, these are great people. Oh, yeah. We want them. We want them. Let's go. Let's go. And they're all excited. I said, "You got to give them a 30% increase, though." 30 people in a room, all excited, loud, noisy, and stone silence. Oh, no. We can't do that. I said, "But it's not money. It's not money. It's the non-monetary factors. Money has to be competitive, but you got to give them a 30% non-monetary increase. It's got to be some stretch. Five or 10% of the 30% could be a bigger job. 5 or 10% could be a bigger impact. They're smaller company doing more impact companywide. Five or 10% could be satisfaction. They like doing this work. And it's got to be growth. It's got to if you're if you're not they're not growing year after year, it's it's over. So, another five or 10%. So, your goal is to give people a 30% non-monetary increase. That's the only way you're going to achieve a win-win hiring outcome. And I said, but the first thing you're going to do going to use job descriptions anymore. So, for the rest of this program, we're going to throw away job descriptions. Skills B are a waste of time. They get you in trouble. You can't hire the right person. You can't hire people like this. So I said, "So at least for the next two to three hours as I go through this workshop, think about never using a skills-based job description again. I know that will be hard, but that's what we have to do to achieve these kind of results." And when we do it, managers actually do it. What turns out now I can create these job descriptions instantly just like I did for this call center. I mean for the somebody in a crisis center. That was always the hard part. But getting hiring managers to see this illogically they went forward. So let me kind of give you the score how we measure quality of hire though. A level one is someone who in the bottom third there are people who have the skills, experience and competencies but not really motivated to do the work. You hired them. They probably got a good personality. Uh they were hungry for the job. Uh but they did all the things. They're reasonably competent but not motivated at all to do the work for one reason or another. They don't fit for one reason or another. The bottom 10% are the real bad hires. You shouldn't have hired them anyway. Bottom third though, they're hard to get rid of. The bottom third, a lot of companies have legal things. Once you hire someone, you now level two about the 50. They're basically qualified, solid people, get the job done, not highly motivated. They're doing it. uh but they're good, but they're not great. They just okay. And that's a lot of hires are level two. A level three is a top third. These are people who are competent, motivated, get the work done, reliable, good quality skills. These are people who you can trust to handle tough projects and will get it done. A great hire. Level four is a top 15 to 20%. And I tell hiring managers, you hire a level four, this person will be your peer in three years. They're that good. So, you better give them a job that lets them grow that fast. And level five will probably be your boss in two to three years. Just recognize that. I said, but here's the secret. It's hard to determine the difference between a two, three, or four or three, four, and five. It's hard. It's all the fit factors. All the fit. That's hard. So, here's the key to hiring success. You throw away your job descriptions. You define the work and no level twos. You just find people who are motivated to do that work in your situation. You spend most of your time in the interview making sure they're somewhere uh top third. And who knows, uh some situations they'll be in the top third, sometimes they'll be in the top 5%. As long as they're motivated to do that work in your situation, you got a great hire. They will be in the top third. and it will sometimes they'll be better than others, but they'll always be motivated to do the work. You do those things. Throw away job descriptions, no twos in terms of motivation, you're in the game. That's performance-based hiring. So now, let me ask you this question. I'll answer it. I want you to write down of all the things I've said, what's the most important thing I said today? Most important thing I said, come up with Everybody's got to put in something. Most important thing I said. I know it's late at night for you guys, but hopefully you'll be awake all night thinking of this. So, so come in here. I need I got 100 people here. I need a hundred answers. Most important thing I heard each and every word. Well, come on, honey. Thank you. No, it's really like that. Okay, keep on going to L5. Okay, so I want to see them. Okay, let's go here. I got two. The drivers of success, not skills, their situations. Good. Thanks, Mary. Yeah, you're right. Motivation is the key. And let me just say this about motivation. Sometimes you can be very, very quiet and introverted and be highly motivated. And sometimes you can be loud, outgoing, friendly, warm, prepared. That doesn't mean you're motivated. to get at motivation. What I do is when I ask these questions about uh tell me about your best accomplishments, I'm asking as part of that is where did you go the extra mile? What kind of work in that did you really like? What kind of work did you go the take the initiative? So, I'm getting clues each time I see it to see a pattern of motivation. And if I make a decision whether the person is aggressive or assertive in the interview, that has nothing to do with motivation on the job. And that's very important. Sometimes very quiet people in the right situation, they get equally as motivated. So you got that's why I give you my last clue. This might be the best clue at all. Best clue at all. So everybody listen carefully. This is the best one. I forgot to tell you. I can't believe it. Oh no. What am I going to do? Best clue at all. I don't make I'm a good interviewer. I became a great interviewer when I decided I didn't care if I like the person or not. I call it the Sherlock Holmes technique. I became a great interviewer when I said, "Somebody else made the decision if that person's good or not. That person's boss, those person's peers, they've got three to five or 10 years of work experience. How can I judge this person in a half hour? I just got to find out other people judge these people." So, I call that the Sherlock Holmes evidence technique. And in technology or at most jobs, it doesn't matter what the job is. If the person's been assigned big teams, obviously they've got good team skills. If they've been assigned stretch projects, they've obviously have technical skills. So, I just look for evidence of where this person went the extra mile and how other people judge this candidate. If the candidate's always getting average jobs year after year, they're an average person. I mean, it's but I but you can't make a judgment whether you like the person or not. You got to look for evidence that what other people assign this person. Uh it's not what you do, it's what you have that counts. Okay, any questions we want? I think these are coming in. Uh the quota performance based is a business process. God, you guys are good. I've got to take you to my next conference. I think I'm going to be in Paris uh in when October October in Paris. Mr. Can I ask one question? Um like um let me provide context on that. You asked about um AI and technical adoptation here in Armenia. It's not happening that fast but still it's happening and after months we see what the same is being repeated of what's in us and as far as I remember like the previous year our tax sector it was around 7 to 8% of our GDP so quite fast now I want to ask like you need at this moment of time as a recruiter as a hiring manager you need to hire for immediate performance right immediate good performance performance and this is needed. Everyone is looking for resultoriented professionals to be able to perform now. But from the other side, we have this market dynamics and market is changing quite fast and skills are being changed quite fast. So how to balance this in manable for for manable for HR? How to balance this um as a recruiter as as uh as someone who is responsible for people lives as you have mentioned. Okay, we're going to do something a little weird here, but you got to bear with me. I'm going to unshare this. Let me unstop the share and going to go to another share which is going to be got to find my Safari. Come on. Come on. Come on. Okay, let's share that. It doesn't want to share that. Had that happen. So, stop the share. share. Okay, this I've got to go here. Sorry, guys. But I'm going to go here. So, I just put in something in chat, which is a bunch of free tools. Uh, but one of the tools is our 247 hotline. So, we call this hotline digital Lou. So, your question again, Annie. Well, here's what I'm going to do. So, I'm going to ask Digital Lou the answer to the questions if he comes up with it. Okay. If not, so you so you have trained AI based on your model. Last years, I've been helping candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers attract, interview, and recruit candidates for professional staff and management positions in large and small companies. How can I help you either find a better job or hire a great person? Hey Lou, I've got a bunch of recruiters and HR people in Armenia. They're under the pressure to hire great people but don't have time to do it. What advice would you give them? The first thing I'd tell them is this. Stop trying to do everything at once. When recruiters are under pressure, they often default to reactive hiring, posting jobs, screening resumeumés, and rushing through interviews. That's a recipe for mediocre hires and burnout. Instead, they need to slow down and focus on what I call performance-based hiring. Define the job as a series of outcomes, not a list of skills. What does success look like in six months, in a year? That clarity will save them time later. Next, they need to prioritize networking over cold outreach. 90% of top candidates find their jobs through referrals, not job boards. So, your team should spend more time building relationships and less time chasing strangers. Teach them to ask every candidate, who's the best person you've ever worked with. That one question can unlock a gold mine of pre-qualified leads. Finally, they need to master the 30inut exploratory call. This isn't about selling the job. It's about understanding the candidates's career goals and seeing if there's a match. Done right, it's the most efficient way to engage passive candidates and convert jobs into career moves. How are they currently splitting their time between sourcing, screening, and networking? That'll tell us where the biggest opportunity for improvement lies. Okay. So, uh, okay. You can I let me I'm going to go back to share something else and then we can we'll end our program today. But happy to let me share something else with you guys which I'm giving you. Well, digital I unfortunately I the way the system works, you get a few free calls and then they charge you like a a 10 cents a minute. So, I nothing I can do about it. This is how they set it up. But let me uh go back to the PowerPoint. Okay. go back to it's other it's your voice right? Did I get it right? It's your voice. Yes. Well, here's what happened. My wife doesn't think it's my voice, but I think it is. Uh I uploaded like a thousand articles, all the books, all the training, and a five minute uh voice thing. They listen to my voice for five minutes. And I said, "Give it a New York edge." Because that's where I was born, New York City. And it's pretty good. But so here at Money, I put it in the chat area. you have access to this tool uh money ball for HR. It gives you some free stuff uh overview of our system, how to create job, it gives you a simple job description, how to conduct an interview and then the hotline and a moneyball rule book. So it keeps you get in the game here. Uh you should have fun with that with recruiter Lou. Anyway, uh and so let me just end this story with so this company I'm talking about this build you know do design work in the construction industry the president of the company is a woman uh so they and so at the end of it I asked them similar question what was the most important thing you heard today and I said before since I and it was late at night for them it was like 6:00 or 7 at night like for you guys and I could see everybody was tired and I said well let me ask Digital Lou what the most important thing was said pretty much the same thing. Define work as a series of performance objectives. You as a hiring manager will it will be transformative if you're a hiring manager. So Danielle who is the president of the company says I want to marry digital Lou. Her husband was on the call. I said don't tell me about it. I don't want to know. You're on your own there. But that's u so it was fun. U but it seems to give it does pretty good advice. I'm kind of I'm surprised it kind of scary actually to tell you the truth that it gives the advice that I think it's pretty right on. So hopefully you guys humble with that. It was great chatting with you. I'll take a few questions if you have any. I'm happy to hang on a minute or two if you want. Uh yeah, let me see if we have questions or not. Okay, bunch of thank you. S and this question is let me read it for you. In your book, you wrote that recruiting the best is not about selling or charming, but about uh offering big challenges and career opportunities. Considering your hiring formula for success, what would you what would you Oh, I missed it. Wait. Yeah, I know. It moves. Yeah, it moves because people are writing. It's Kima. My student is writing. I want to read it until the end. So, okay. Yeah. What would be the key steps for high touch roles in luxury retail, premium, automotive and hospitality field where the wow factor matters here? What what are your thoughts on that? Well, I didn't hear exactly the situation. So, let me kind of make it generic for a lot of different people. So, and I'm going to give you a couple stories which I think are relevant. Sometimes we think what's important for the job is not important. So a friend of mine was the VPHR of the Win Hotels in Las Vegas, you know, the big gambling casinos and he was hire and they were just opening them up. It's probably 20 30 years ago and putting all these new big buildings up and I think it was also in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Macau I think. So he was involved in all of that and he found that people hospitality people particularly in those restaurants that serving drinks and uh all the whole things you do in a restaurant or a hotel the ability to deal with people real time asking lots of questions was the critical skill. So and it being disrupted all the time and he found this being disrupted all the time was the skill. So what he did, uh, so you got this giant hotel opening up in Las Vegas or Macau. People would line up, thousands of people would line up. So what he did is he had once people filled in their application, he'd send them down a hallway. And down the hallway, somebody would come out of the room and disrupt them. Oh, excuse me. I'm sorry you did that. And if the person got flustered, they would send them to the exit. If they didn't get flustered, they'd send them to the full interview. It was that thing of the ability to deal with frustration and things happening all the time was critical. That wasn't the whole job, but if they couldn't deal with that, they they were out of it. We did something else where someone was in a call center. Uh it was taking inbound insurance claims and I asked the hiring managers. It was like 5,000 people over six different insurance call centers. Each call center had 500 800 people listening to the phones all the time. They're probably all in India now. Uh, nonetheless, uh, they were handling three to five or six inbound calls at one time, checking insurance claims. Uh, and we had this the job defined as a series of performance objectives. So, I said, well, and it was like was it was somewhere in Los Angeles area and I said, well, I want some let's put some names around this. So, I said, and these people from different parts of the United States, New York, New Jersey, Texas, I said, tell me about the best people in each of your groups. So each of these groups we had three or four names. Three or four, most of them women, but three or four names. And I said, "Now we had 20 names here." I said, "Are all of these people exactly that profile you have written there?" They said, "No." I said, "What's common about all of these 20 people?" What it was was 100% attendance. The job wasn't that hard. It was showing up and doing it. It was a very structured job dayto-day. Uh so the only thing I can say is when you build this performance-based job description, also assign names to it. Benchmark the best people who work for you and find out what do they do that's the same. And then all of a sudden you now compare the two to see what it is. We've done that lots of times, but benchmarking the best might be. And again, I'm sorry because I not 100% sure I heard the exact question, but I think that's a good answer for a lot of other questions you might have. So, I think we've got to run now. Thank you very much. Hopefully, this was helpful. Thank you, Annie. Thank you for inviting me. Good luck, everybody. Uh, you have an enormous opportunity in HR. Make sure you change the rules and make it happen. Don't just sit with the status quo. Take a leadership role. Make it happen. Take the risk. The risk. Sometimes it's risky not to. It's more risky not to do anything than it is to do something. So, I urge you do something important. Play moneyball for HR. Thank you guys. Byebye. Thank you. Byebye. Thank you very much for bringing your experience, Mr. Adner. And whenever you decide to have a vacation in Armenia, just ping us. Bye-bye. Thanks.