Flexible Workplace Thinking

Case-by-case hard thinking is the only way to optimize hiring, job roles, and nearly everything else you do.

Sep 07, 2021

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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A friend of Clipboard Health (call him Dave) sometimes tells a story about when he was younger and working for an insurance company as his first “real” job. At the time, one of the longer-tenured managers had just moved on to greener pastures and the company was working hard to replace them. External candidates were hard to come by at the time so the company encouraged internal applications, especially from the departing manager’s team.

One day, he popped into the floor manager’s office to see how things were going, and the topic of the team popped up. Dave had always considered one member of the team, Tom, to be the frontrunner for the position; he regularly led the team in performance and was generally well-liked. He was surprised to learn that a hiring decision had already been made, but much more surprised to learn that the candidate chosen was Pamela, a middle-performer at best who was mostly disliked by everyone on the team.

“Why Pamela instead of Dave, since Dave is better than her?” he asked, confused. The floor manager let him know that yes, Dave was better in every important way, but Pamela had a college degree; the company preferred all of its managers to have college degrees and she wasn’t about to buck company policy for something as silly as a well-performing team.

Dave loves this story; it’s his go-to example of how corporations can go crazy enough to knowingly hire the wrong person based on nothing stronger than a “rules are rules” rationale. Admittedly, this is easy-mode stuff; perhaps only the biggest and least flexible of corporations are regularly fully aware they are passing up talent and doing it anyway. But it does give a good example of the value of flexible thinking and the advantages gained by being willing to work around the rules on a case-by-case basis.

At CBH, we are all about flipping little truths around and looking at them from different angles, and this is no exception. We’ve experienced firsthand that there’s a lot to be gained from flexibility in hiring specifically and job roles in general, just as there’s a lot to be lost by being too rigid.

Flexible hiring

Imagine you get a perfect applicant for a director-level position. They have the experience, they approach the work in a way you love and they are a perfect cultural fit. It’s the kind of person you might spend serious money getting a recruiter to find or months of cold-outreach sourcing to get, and they just fell into your lap.

Now imagine they didn’t get past your initial screening process because they applied to a mid-level position to get the conversation moving and their requested salary was higher than the cap on what’s approved for the job. It doesn’t matter how good you are at spotting talent if you never see their application to begin with.

Now flip that problem around the other way - you have someone who isn’t ready for the mid-level position they applied for. Your screening process accurately identifies that they don’t have some of the must-haves for the position and sends a rejection. That’s a rejection based on experience, not quality. It’s not wrong to do that - you can’t have a manager who doesn’t manage, for instance - but some of those kinds of applicants are still talented people who would be better in more junior roles. Is your screening process sensitive enough to catch them?

In one way or another every candidate you cross paths with costs you something in terms of resources. By the time you’ve rejected one you’ve spent whatever you needed to put out just to find them plus either your or an employee’s time, and those costs only get higher the more selective you are. Since this is especially true for high-level people, it’s really important you aren’t giving up the freebies.

Partially solving this problem involves emphasizing with your early-stage screeners the importance of not letting people go and the value of each applicant. Have those conversations; make sure they know the value they are letting go of. But fully solving the problem is harder; like most things, it requires some institutional agility and flexibility that not everyone has. Are you willing to hire outside of your schedule? There’s reasons you might want to stick to your plans and not have extra staff, but this means that if your dream candidate falls in your lap with less-than-perfect timing, you might lose them.

Another element to fully solving the problem we’ve identified is getting more knowledgeable people in the process sooner. A member of your product team is going to have knowledge of the workings of the team and the quality of product candidates that a generic recruiter just can’t have; their day-to-day work gives them insight nobody outside of their department has. Some companies and teams just don’t have the flexibility they need to give up that kind of time to the recruiting process, but if you do, it’s a huge difference; getting more knowledge on the case quicker means you keep more of what you want and more accurately screen out the folks who don’t fit the bill sooner.

CBH has gone all-in on this concept in several of our job roles; they are handled start-to-finish by team members directly under the hiring manager for the role. That means that, say, a product team candidate will go through the entire hiring process from application to offer without talking to someone who doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of the team and how it works; nobody will so much as look at their resume without the context to parse the kind of experience and skills they have to offer. It’s a much-improved experience for the candidate, and we move forward at every step with as much information as possible; everyone wins here.

Flexibility with Titles

Definitions are important. Here’s the Google-able definition of “Job Title”:

a name that describes someone's job or position.
"his official job title is administrative assistant"

Note that it describes either someone’s job (what they do) or their position. A title that describes someone’s job - floor sweeper and dishwasher, say - is a lot different than one that describes a person’s socioeconomic status more than anything, like “Vice President” does. Which one we emphasize means a lot, if nothing else because most people’s job titles don’t do a great job of emphasizing what they actually do.

Take a job title like “Analyst”. People doing that job have a tremendous range of responsibilities, everything from CRM administration to pure SQL database work to phone calls to users to get feedback and more. You might have an analyst who does a massive amount for a company beyond what people with titles we usually consider to be superior do. That analyst might be paid well and be doing important work, but still feels pigeon-holed as something lesser because of the positioning aspect of the title. The job title doesn’t describe what they do, and manages to make them feel limited; that’s a loss on both fronts.

In most situations, titles actually work against the goal of what you want: Having everyone in the company feel like they have an equal stake in the company’s success. At CBH, we actually try to make sure that everyone knows that titles mean very, very little to us. They describe what a person’s position in the company is at a very basic level, but beyond having something to put on their resume we work very hard to make sure that everyone knows that what they do and the ownership they show is what we are actually paying attention to. Their title isn’t what's determining their pay, or what kind of projects they get to work on. Who they are and what they do is.

This applies to everything

This article lists a couple of examples of places where mental flexibility fixes some problems, but don’t focus too much on them. The through-line here isn’t that this task or that task benefits from flexibility, but that everything does. CBH is a start-up; our COO often mentions that one of our only advantages in the David vs. Goliath match-up with bigger companies is our ability to be flexible and quick where they can’t. When a company gets big enough, it almost always loses that flexibility; big organizations need a lot of structure to stay stable, and that means they end up rigid.

But just because small companies can be stable doesn’t mean they always manage to be. Keeping your flexibility advantage means you have to approach every situation as a potential one-off, willing and able to custom fit a solution for the problem at hand. It’s work, but it’s the kind of work that keeps small organizations strong; don’t pass up the opportunity.