Interview with Lou Adler, CEO at Performance-based Hiring Learning Systems

Meet Lou Adler, CEO at Performance-based Hiring Learning Systems, and the author of the books “Hire with your head” and “The essential guide for hiring.” We discussed the key challenges and top priorities of recruiting nowadays and beyond.

25 years ago, in 1997, a book and a study came out that said with job boards, the Birth of the Internet applicant Tracking Systems, and the use of new technology, the war for talent would be won, and it would be easy to hire people.

It was 25 years ago. Back then, I wrote an article at that point and said that would never happen. It would be a waste of money because that’s not how good people change jobs in the interim 25 years; probably $500 billion has been spent on hiring and technology, and nothing’s changed. We just have more people changing jobs more quickly. And there’s this hustle to do it as fast as possible. In my mind, that was the creation of technology, which put recruiting on a downhill trend.

Internet and a quick change of work through employees

Sadly, I don’t see that trend reversing. I see it in some isolated instances where people recognize that recruiting needs to be a high-touch process. If I try to recruit you, and you’re a good person, and you’re reasonably happy, you’re not going to just take a job without thinking it through.

You go on LinkedIn, and here are ten job ideas for you. So, all these job boards and LinkedIn get people to change jobs and make money. But the people changing jobs aren’t any more satisfied. They might make a little more money. They’re all changing jobs because they’ve been seduced to change jobs. And that, to me, is a fundamental problem. And I see nothing changing.

So I said this 25 years ago, and I still believe that’s true today. Sad to say, but this technology is going to solve the problem. I’ve been around at least 50 or 100 different new technologies, and none of them work. And yet, the next one will solve all those problems that the other 99 didn’t solve.

Well, actually, it’s not a challenge if you do the right thing because I help companies hire people. We define work a little bit differently. We take longer to interview the candidate and must give the candidate more time to make a proper career decision. And then, we compare jobs based on not only what they get on the start date but also the work they’re going to be doing and whom they’re going to be doing it with, and the career opportunity. So, we look at all those factors in much greater depth. And then we call that a high-tech, high-touch process.

But without the high touch, you just leave it to it. You make it very transactional, just like buying groceries with this pastry because it’s $0.10 cheaper. So, I think the idea is that, yes, a good recruiter and good people can find jobs in this market, but it’s probably going to be more personal and high touch and more long-term and more discriminating.

Well, you got to remember, I’m an old guy, so I don’t do recruiting, but I still help companies train recruiters, and I basically say that is the key to hiring better people. And I make this statement. If you want to hire a great person, you should have a great job. And a great job isn’t a laundry list of skills, experience, and competencies. Having a great job defines the work the person will be doing, why that work is intrinsically satisfying, and why that work enables this person to become better at what they want to become.

It matches the job and the candidate’s aspirations with the company’s job and their needs to fill that job. And that’s the stiff challenge, making those two things work together. And technology is not to solve that too well.

Well, number one, there are two dimensions.

Workforce planning

How many people do they need to hire for what kind of work? That’s called workforce planning. So, the company expects, like, I just saw a report today that Ford Motor Company is opening their new AV truck, the electronic truck. But I know they will lay off many people who make combustion and gas engines and hire more engineers to make electric cars. So, when they had a plan together, they knew we wanted to sell 500,000 trucks between 1923 and 1925. We need 14 factories; we need this, so they can create a workforce plan of what they need. So, they know the people they need to hire at some level.

Internal mobility

Now, if you’re looking for engineers or anybody, hire people who can have raw skills. Maybe you have to be an electrical engineer and a computer software guy to help design a truck. And you have to be smart to learn stuff. So, they need people with these basic skills and the capacity to learn and grow.

Background I do have an engineering undergraduate degree. So I knew when I first graduated at 22 years old, I knew some stuff, but I got on a job, and I learned how to use that and learn other stuff. And then I got into assignments, and they said, okay, you got to go to this week of training to do this. So you have to be adaptable and grow. So you have these core skills that a person has.

And then the company, as you’re intelligent and capable and can grow, that you map and you want to do those things, provides extra training or you learn extra stuff. So I have someone I talked to the other day who’s taking some advanced Python courses and taking some other training concerning that people grow and adapt. Even so, have some core skills in that arena and be a person who wants to learn and grow and be challenged by learning all the time.

Candidates do self-development. They take courses on their own; they read more books. So you can find people who have that capacity to want to grow and learn if they have brought the core capability to the initial job.

To me, a good recruiter, and I was a recruiter for many years, and in time, for ten years, I only dealt with the best accounting people in Southern California. And I’m telling that story because you called me if you needed an excellent accounting person. So I have developed a profound network of accountants. When I was 20, as someone who was just out of accounting school, these people would always call me constantly with names of good accountants. Companies would call me, “Hey, we know Lou has great accounts.”

I also had a lot of background in manufacturing and medical devices, so I had many clients and an intense network. So if you needed a manufacturing person to make some new medical device, “Hey, let’s call Lou. He probably has a deep network.” So all I had to do was make one or two phone calls, and within two or three days, I had half a dozen good candidates for that job.

How did I do it?

I joined clubs. I joined groups. There were different people I was involved with. I met different people. I interviewed other candidates. “Hey, let’s just have a meeting, and we’ll connect for the future.” So I really developed the art of networking as the key to being a good recruiter. And I still think that’s critical. Just if I call you up and I never knew you, and I find your name on LinkedIn, and I call you up as a cold call, you will not trust me. You know, all my interest is to make a quick placement.

On the other hand, if I knew your sister, your brother, or a good friend, I said, “Hey, this person, this friend of yours just called. He said you’re a great engineer, and I would love to chat with you about something.” You have this instant connection, so it’s developing those warm, converting these cold calls to warm cores, and you can do that through networking. You still should have a good job. So that the other point is to have a great job and build a network; that’s how recruiters can really be a tremendous asset to a company.