Anthony Nyberg Of The University of South Carolina On How To Identify and Engage The Best Talent For Your Organization
Identify the intended business strategy. We cannot identify who will be best for a position if we do not know how that position fits into the bigger picture of where we want to go. Too often organizations choose leaders based on their predetermined fondness for a person without first understanding where the organization wants to go. For instance, in hiring a new media director, the organization should first think about what the goals are for company media.
Companies are always on the lookout for exceptional talent in today’s work environment. In addition, the perks needed to keep talent have changed as people are not simply running after a paycheck. They want something more. What does a company need to do to identify and engage the best talent for their organization? In this interview series, we are talking to HR experts who can share ideas and insights from their experience. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Nyberg.
Anthony Nyberg is a professor of management at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina and the faculty director at the school’s Center for Executive Succession. Nyberg teaches courses about negotiation, compensation and performance management and research methods. His research focuses on how organizations compete through people, specifically the strategic role of pay in their attraction, emergence, retention and motivation, including those in the C-suite. Nyberg received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Prior to that, he earned an MBA from Tulane University. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Mathematics from St. John’s College. Nyberg served for nine years as the managing partner for an international financial services firm based in Northern California, where he held Series 7, 24, 55 and 63 licenses, and he earned his certified financial analyst designation. During that time, he was also a licensed mediator and arbitrator for the National Association of Securities Dealers.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to get to know you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?
I became a professor through a series of unexpected and unintended events. After receiving my MBA, I took a job as an equity trader in Chicago and then started a financial services firm in San Francisco that was primarily focused on Nasdaq Market-Making. A dramatic life change led me to earn my PhD, which as lead to a life as a researcher focusing on how organizations compete through people, with a special emphasis on executive succession.
Most of the turns along the path are a result of specific individuals who stepped in to alter my trajectory. For instance, my wife and first child nudged me to leave the firm that I had started to return to school to get a PhD. While there, my advisor Barry Gerhart and my advocate Charlie Trevor instilled a joy of researching about strategic human resources. After arriving at the University of South Carolina, my colleagues here pushed me to excel in new areas which as lead to us launching the Center for Executive Succession (CES).
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you first started? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I wholeheartedly agree with the statement and think the biggest mistakes in my life are not having learned more from more of them. I have a difficult time finding much humor in most of my more serious mistakes, and they return to haunt my consciousness. However, I will share two.
The first will sound trivial, but when I think of mistakes, it immediately springs to mind. This was a time that I let someone down when I was 16. I have made much more consequential mistakes sense then, but this is something that still haunts me 40 years later. I was the member of a club and had agreed to take responsibility for delivering Valentine’s Day hearts to everyone in our high school. I procrastinated, then tried to write the 1,400 cards, all alone, the night before the holiday. I didn’t come close to finishing. I had to admit failure. I still remember the instructor’s face, even though I don’t remember her name, and my extreme embarrassment. I took away two things — I need to be careful about what I commit to and I cannot forgive myself when I let others down so I need to be much more aggressive much earlier in a project so I don’t let others down.
In terms of humorous mistakes, I am particularly bad with names (and faces). That often makes me overwhelmingly shy about conversing. Very recently, I was at a meeting and in a particularly proud mood. That gave me confidence to strut around the room. While strutting, I walked over to introduce myself to a person in the meeting. He informed me that I had done the exact same thing when I introduced myself to him the previous year. I then started trying to play it off by commenting on how it was great having him join the group. He reminded me that I shared the exact same comments and excuse last year when it turned out I had also introduced myself to him the previous three years. Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, I introduced myself to the same person four years in a row. In terms of lessons, it serves as a much-needed, and continual reminder to me, that in the moments where I lose my humility, I often make a fool of myself.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote” and how that was relevant to you in your life?
The only quote that I keep on my computer because I both believe it to be true and desperately want it to be true is a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
“The heights by great men reached and kept, were not attained by a sudden flight.
But they whilst their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.”
Are you working on any exciting new projects at your company? How are they helping people?
Research at the CES is focused on helping organizations do better through people. There has never been a time when this was more important for organizations, the employees who work in them and our society overall.
Wonderful. Now let’s jump into the main focus of our series. Hiring can be very time-consuming and challenging. Can you share with our readers a bit about your experience with identifying and hiring talent? What’s been your most successful recruitment-related initiative so far?
Throughout my career, the identification and successful recruitment of talent has proven paramount to success.
We sometimes forget that we should all be constantly recruiting. Recruitment isn’t just about who you hire it’s also about what co-workers and organizations you partner.
Society’s increasing reliance on social media and technology to drive recruitment efforts can make it easier to reach larger pools of people. The extent we allow it to substitute for strong interpersonal relations, may, in some situations, lead to pooper long-term outcomes.
Once talent is engaged, what’s your advice for creating a great candidate experience and ensuring the right people go through the process?
A great candidate experience starts from the very first interaction. My colleague, Lynn McFarland, is doing interesting research that shows the earliest contact in the recruiting phase can make a meaningful difference not just on who decides to join the organization, but also on their attitudes and behaviors as employees and even as customers.
A crucial aspect of a great candidate experience is ensuring employees have great work experiences, so they are excited to welcome new colleagues and encourage others to join the organization. This means consistently ensuring the organization has a great culture in which employees are motivated by the mission, energized by their colleagues and enthusiastic ambassadors for the organization.
Based on your experience, how can HR and culture professionals work with the broader organization to identify talent needs?
It’s important to note that HR professionals cannot identify talent needs well if they are not working with the broader organization. The idea that any person or group can sit in a centralized location and determine what is needed in every area of an organization is long-outdated. Rather, HR should help the organization think strategically about what needs to be accomplished and what talent needs to be in place to achieve success (e.g., win in the marketplace). Then your HR team should work closely with leaders who are tasked with implementing a strategy to understand what talent will help those leaders succeed.
Is there anything you see that recruiters, internal or otherwise, do regularly that makes you think, “No, stop doing that?”
One area of recruiting that has long bothered me is that many organizations begin the recruitment process too late. Relatedly, a lot of companies overvalue what they have. It’s a form of the endowment effect in which we value what we already have more than its market value. The combination of both can lead to a lack of effectiveness early in the recruiting process.
On the other hand, my colleague Lynn McFarland, who is an expert in recruiting research, notes that organizations often paint too good a picture of the job and the organization leading to problems down the line. She writes:
“I wish that companies would stop trying to sell the job to candidates. We know from decades of research that people who are given honest information about the pros and cons of a job are more likely to take the job and also more likely to stay in the job much longer (compared to those who had unrealistic expectations). The great thing is, it’s easy and free to give people a clear expectation of what the job will be like — just be honest.”
With so much noise and competition out there, what are your top three ways to attract and engage the best talent in an industry when they haven’t already reached out to you?
- Using a referral program can be incredibly beneficial for organizations. There is plenty of research about the tremendous benefits from referrals in both the quality of employees that join the organization and the longevity of those that join. However, less well-known is the effect on the person doing the referring. Recent research shows there are tremendous benefits for those doing the referring as well, which include greater commitment to the organization, reduced turnover likelihood, and improved performance.
- Sustain an inviting recruitment process that places the organization in the best light from the start. As we move towards greater automation and less personalization, we in HR should be hyper-vigilant and work to better use technology to foster positive experiences for potential recruits from their very first interaction with the organization. For example, I recently tried to order food online from a new restaurant. Unfortunately, their online ordering system was challenging to use. This led me to choose to order from a different one. That same experience can happen during the recruiting process. Remember, people have options. Be careful to not drive them to choose another organization because their initial experience wasn’t positive.
- Culture is a key decision-maker for companies and job candidates. Select employees who embrace and embody your team culture. Also, connect prospective employees with culture champions within your organization who can authentically articulate the benefits of working for your organization. You know you’ve succeeded when those outside your organization are questioning what you did to attract and retain such great people.
Here is the main question of our interview. Can you share five techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill?
Much of our research focuses on c-suite succession. In this space, identifying the right talent is essential for the long-term success of the organization. Rather than five, I am sharing seven steps to help choose the right talent at the CEO level and throughout much of the organization. Please note, credit for the overall model goes to my colleague, Professor Rob Ployhart, who is one of the world’s leading experts in selection research.
- Identify the intended business strategy. We cannot identify who will be best for a position if we do not know how that position fits into the bigger picture of where we want to go. Too often organizations choose leaders based on their predetermined fondness for a person without first understanding where the organization wants to go. For instance, in hiring a new media director, the organization should first think about what the goals are for company media.
- Understand the talent strategy. First, identify the critical tasks that must be accomplished. Then, use the knowledge, skills and behaviors needed to accomplish those tasks. Again, tasks should align with an intended business strategy. When hiring, be careful to not just simply select a candidate because they have the same skillsets or education as candidates that have performed well before. As your organization evolves, so should roles. It’s essential to choose candidates that have the skills your organization needs today and down the road to achieve organizational success.
- Understand all open jobs. Some roles are required to help your organization differentiate itself in the marketplace. Place extra care and attention on capturing the best talent in those areas. For instance, in a pharmaceutical company, we may need extraordinary research scientists. If that is the case, then we should be very careful about how we select our research scientists because they will help us win in the marketplace. Other jobs, however, while important, don’t not make as much of a largescale difference. For instance, not getting payroll correct is a critical issue and embarrassing to any organization. However, having the best payroll people in the business, may not help your differentiate itself from competitors. As the CHRO of one of our partner companies has been known to say, “Know where good is good enough.”
- Identify the critical tasks. Select the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are really needed for the job and hire someone who has them. The current infatuation with skills-based hiring is in principle a very good idea. However, it’s recommended that you identify the skills that are needed to excel rather than focusing on peripheral attributes. For instance, it is becoming much more common for boards to select professionals with certain skills like accounting experience, cyber security expertise and HR knowledge. Today, there is still a strong tendency to add CEOs to boards because they had been a CEO. This may be a great decision in some cases, but it also may not always bring the needed expertise. Additionally, relying on what worked in the past also makes it much more challenging to bring diverse perspectives to boards that can help drive organizational success. Like everything, there is also a warning. We know a role can be more than what’s in the job description. So, we need to be careful not to be too beholden to a pure skills-based perspective.
- Use validated selection tools. Implement assessment tools that are designed to evaluate the competencies identified for the role to be performed effectively. As best as possible, avoid “flash.” For example, as we move into a world dominated by AI, ensure that whatever tools are being used to facilitate the selection process are free of bias and achieve the strategic goals desired.
- Use multiple raters. After determining where we want the organization to go and the skills needed to get there, carefully consider the pool of candidates and enlist the help of another skilled professional to examine them too.
- Examine relevant work. Ask for a portfolio or include opportunities for candidates to showcase their skills during the hiring process. For example, if it’s important that a future CFO speak to the board and investors, then put the candidate in a position to share how he/she would do so. In addition to being a great way to evaluate a candidate, this exercise also can be a developmental opportunity. When evaluating a candidate be laser focused on the knowledge, skills and abilities pertinent to success in the role.
We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.
The list of people that I would like to learn from is extraordinarily long! Right now, I’d really like to listen to a conversation between Satya Narayana Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Janice Bryant Howroyd the founder and CEO of the ActOne Group. I am passionate about understanding how generative AI is going to change our workforce and I cannot think of two people who I would learn more from on this topic.
How can our readers continue to follow your work online?
I encourage you to follow the (CES) on LinkedIn.
Thank you so much for these fantastic insights!
