I was on my way to Houston a few months ago. My company decided my job was going away in Lubbock and they offered me a position in Houston and although I wasn’t particularly enamored with the idea I, like most the folks we saw at the L-PEP meeting, needed to eat and so I loaded up a car, a trailer and other semi-worldly belongings and headed south. The road to Houston is sort of interesting as you pass through the fields of wind turbines that used to be around Sweetwater and now stretch from about Lake Alan Henry south (that’s probably an overstatement, but there are a bunch of them).At the same time there are patches of say 500 miles where there’s not a whole heck-u-va-lot going on and so I was either forced to listen to really bad talk radio, unlike Todd Klein’s show on AM 580 (I had to say that as Todd had me on to talk about L-PEP), or I was forced to try and find some other self-entertainment and I’m generally not that entertaining.
So I thought. I had been kicking around the idea of L-PEP, although I hadn’t come up with the name, or the bird logo thing or any of that, but I knew I wanted to do something and I wanted to do something for folks in trouble and my background was human resources and I knew a lot about hiring and…and…and.
And President Obama had sort of said in one of those amazing speeches he gives (and like him or wish someone else had won no one can suggest he doesn’t know how to talk) to “get off your backside, see what you can do and do something.” I think he used better vocabulary, but I believe I captured the meaning.
And I had been fascinated by his campaign. Not because of his ideas, which were substantial, as were all (and I do mean all) of the other major candidates (we’re pretty fortunate in this country for this reason—we have essentially good intentioned people who stand up to lead—not always, but mostly), but because he got it. Capturing a vote, a heart and a mind isn’t always about defining ad nausea an idea, a concept or a policy. Gosh when Al Gore ran he had more policies than fourteen other candidates combined. Few read them, but he had them and man did he ever have some gray matter or what? President Obama went with simple “Yes We Can.”
Folks would criticize “Yes We Can, What?” and his legions of enthusiastic followers would respond “Yes We Can.” What does this have to do with that?
I love “Yes We Can.” “We the People...” “Yes We Can.” I knew I couldn’t change the world. President Obama can. Hillary Clinton can. John McCain can. Sarah Palin, well, okay, there are points where I have to draw a line and she probably can, but I worry about that one…a lot. So I looked for a world I could change. And I thought on my road to Houston “what about if I took someone who was unemployed and showed them the world I see from my side of the desk?” “What would that look like?”
That’s the concept of L-PEP. Take the gatekeepers in the hiring process, human resources professionals (I decided on using three), set them in front of an audience of unemployed and underemployed folks and let this audience see what we see and let this audience understand the process we use to select candidates that go on to interview that go on to get hired.
No PowerPoint, no forms, no books, no click on this link. Just people talking to one another about a common interest.
I thought about it a lot more than I needed to. The reason I thought about it a lot more than I needed to is that it didn’t seem to be complicated enough. It’s seemed too simple.
And it is. I wish I could make this hard, but here are the instructions for setting up an L-PEP.
(1) Find someone willing to champion this and facilitate (heavy on “facilitate”). This person doesn’t have to be a human resources professional, but this expertise probably helps. Also, this has been sort of a second full-time job, so understand there’s some time involved initially.
(2) Then, get the folks who work on work-related issues involved: I had other HR contacts who turned me on to WorkForce Solutions (and in Texas this is the group that keeps the database of the unemployed, helps with unemployment claims and provides so many resources that it boggles the mind). Somewhere Lubbock Economic Development Association (LEDA) heard about the project and got on board. Texas Tech University’s Career Center and I hooked up through LEDA, or maybe that was vice versa. We all met. I discussed my concept. Everyone was happy to help.
(3) I contacted as many HR people as I knew, set up and shared a google calendar and invited HR folks to participate on the panel. WorkForce Solutions, who touch the lives of the unemployed every single day, contacted their charges and we put posters up all over the place and then we went out and talked to as many folks as would listen.
I’m trying to make this as complicated as I can, so you may want to add some other stuff.
I did develop three sheets of questions (see following), but the night of the meeting the first thing I told the audience after I told them “if there’s a fire, make sure I get out of the building first,” my concept was to make this “thing” a discussion. I told them I had three sheets of questions I could ask, but this “deal” was really designed for them to ask their questions. We introduced ourselves taking maybe a minute each and I asked one question and the audience basically took over. For two hours they asked questions and our panel responded. I asked the panel to be deathly honest and told the audience I hadn’t asked them to be mean, but I also didn’t think providing false hope and bad information would accomplish anything. And, everyone followed these guidelines for the most part.
Oh, and then I got to Houston, couldn’t stand it, had an offer at First Bank & Trust and so came home. The end.
Questions I had ready
You don’t have to read any further, if you don’t want, but in an attempt to complicate this a lot here are the questions I had at my ready, but didn’t use:
Tell me exactly what you’re looking for when you receive an application or resume.
What’s the one thing you would recommend people do to insure they’re not tossed on the “maybe next time” stack (the biggest mistake people make)?
What really impresses you when you’re looking at these things?
When you post a job and it has “Qualifications,” how rigid are you in terms of an applicant who looks really good, but doesn’t quite meet one or more of the qualifications?
How many times have you looked up an area code or tried to find a phone number if one is missing from an application?
How important is neatness in terms of completing an application?
Along those same lines, how important is completeness?
Do you ever notice things like misspelling or poor grammar? How much does this sort of stuff matter?
When someone writes you a letter of application, what really gets you to thinking “wow, this person really has something on the ball” and what gets you to thinking sort of the opposite?
Are you more or less likely to interview someone who has good grammar and good spelling and whose application is neat and professional and why?
Is there anything I’ve missed regarding the application that you think would be important for these folks to know?
If someone receives a reject letter, should they call you and ask why? Or follow-up, or what would you recommend?
Same sort of question as I started with in applications, but in regards to interviews, what are you looking for when someone comes in for an interview.
Is there anything in all the hiring and interviewing you remember that has happened at the outset of the interview that has pretty much made you sure you’re not going to hire this person? Or, conversely, this person sort of impressed you.
Specifically to articles of clothing (i.e., “men in ties,” “women in a conservative dress or business suit,” “Dockers are fine”), what do you anticipate someone will wear to an interview and why?
Is there any advice you would give to someone for their interview? Like I’ve heard knowing something about the company and the job is important. Stuff like that.
After the interview do you usually receive a thank you note from the person you interviewed and whether or not you do is it important?
Is how the person you interview treated other people in the building important or unimportant? For example, I used to go out and ask our receptionist what she thought and I’d change my opinion based off her perception.
What’s the most difficult question you’ll ask in an interview and why do you ask it?
What are some of the other questions you ask?
Describe for us what a typical interview setting looks like and tell us what kind of interview your organization conducts and why you chose to conduct these sorts of interviews.
How important is it to you that the person being interviewed is calm and relaxed and why or why not?
If someone is simply a basket case during their interview, what’s the best advice you can give someone to get them to relax?
How likely is it that you’ll conduct more than one interview, or that more than one manager will be present, or that the person your organization is interviewing will answer questions from a variety of interviewers?
Do you do anything that you would consider unique during your interview that might surprise someone coming for an interview?
How should someone go about asking about pay?
What sorts of questions are good ones for applicants to ask during an interview?
If someone has something in their past that isn’t very great, like they were fired by a former employer or convicted of a felony or something like that, how should they approach this on their application and during the interview? Are things like this going to exclude them from hire, or just make their life more difficult? What’s the best advice you can give to folks like this?
Talk with us about the best employees you have and what makes them the best.
How have you been successful in your career and what lessons would you draw from your experiences to give someone advice on how to be successful at work?
How important is it that someone get along with their supervisor and coworker?
In terms of policy violations what sorts of things do you see most often?
How important is it that someone be at work and on time every day? If this is important, why?
Everything you’ve heard tonight and everything we’ve discussed, think about it for a moment and then sort of sum up your best advice for everyone in this room.
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