Gershon Goren Of Cangrade On How To Identify and Engage The Best Talent For Your Organization
An Interview With Rachel Kline
Prioritize employee development as one of the main aspects of the talent acquisition. As a company, you need people who can grow, and as an employee you want to see yourself growing. It’s never too early to start the development process. It’s one of the most obvious win-wins.
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 Gershon Goren.
Gershon is an accomplished technologist and entrepreneur with over 29 years experience. Gershon led the engineering group at Webdialogs, a provider of online meeting and communication solutions which was acquired by IBM. Following the acquisition, Gershon acted as Chief Software Architect in the Lotus group of IBM, delivering LotusLive (now known as IBM SmartCloud) — a cloud based collaboration suite. After leaving IBM he got involved in a number of different ventures, but decided to focus on Cangrade’s mission of leveling the playing field for job seekers. Gershon loves cycling and thinks that bicycle is the best form of transportation. Gershon holds degrees in CS and Management of Information Systems from Ben Gurion University of Negev, Israel.
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?
After my previous tech start-up was acquired by IBM, I had a strong need to work on a project with positive social impact. That led me to connect with folks who were conducting research at Harvard around hiring biases and ways to fix them while improving the hiring quality. The rest is history.
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?
It might seem funny in retrospect, but the most serious blunder I made was starting a company with very little knowledge of the industry, the market, and the competition. My excitement about the product made me ignore the basic MBA stuff that anyone who starts a company needs to think about. We literally didn’t know the commonly acceptable name of the thing we were doing was “pre-hire assessments” until at least a year later.
Obviously the lesson is: don’t ignore the fundamentals of a business you are starting. But also, there is a more subtle lesson in this. Some amount of ignorance is needed to start new things and to do them differently. Not knowing what others are doing helped me come up with a completely new data driven approach that put the validity and the bias-free aspect of our product first. This was not at all what others were doing, and the lack of this knowledge was rather beneficial.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote” and how that was relevant to you in your life?
I love the quote by Mary Kay Ash “Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it, so it goes on flying anyway.” Like every entrepreneur, I find this quote very relatable. The number of times you hear that what you are doing is dead on the arrival is countless. You have to be able to ignore the scepticism and go on flying, like a bumblebee.
Are you working on any exciting new projects at your company? How is this helping people?
What we are working on is progressively more exciting. Cangrade is uniquely suited for the time of great re-skilling that we are currently in, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. The ability to identify the potential in people to succeed in jobs for which they don’t yet have any hard skills is crucial. The soft skills that make us human are increasingly the most important skills. Technology will progressively help augment all other skills. People will continue to be in charge of things that require humanity: ethics, creativity, kindness to other people, and this is what Cangrade does the best.
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?
It goes without saying that the role of Cangrade is primarily helping other organizations to enact their recruitment related initiatives. Our contribution is usually evaluating a large pool of applicants and identifying high potential candidates as early in the recruitment process as possible. This determination is done with a very high degree of predictive validity (usually 5–8 times higher than what is expected from a job interview) and with no biases. This way, recruiters can focus all their efforts on a much smaller number of diverse and high potential candidates. They are able to spend more time on them and give the necessary human touch.
Once talent is engaged, what’s your advice for creating a great candidate experience and ensuring the right people go through the process?
Once you know who your high potential candidates are, every effort should be made to engage them, and to make sure that this engagement is informed by what you already learned about them from the previous step. For example, to get the all-around view of a candidate, you need to focus the interview on competencies that represent both the strongest and weakest sides of a candidate. You also need to understand their motivation to make sure you appeal the most important aspects of the job in the candidate’s mind. All that creates stronger connections, and this is where the job success begins. It’s also very important to pass on all these findings to hiring managers and the teams who will be working with an applicant if they are hired.
Based on your experience, how can HR and culture professionals work with the broader organization to identify talent needs?
Cangrade developed a variety of qualitative and quantitative tools for that exact purpose. You need to allow input from leadership and job experts in the understanding of talent needs. But you also need to be informed by the actual data about what drives success. These two ways of analyzing talent needs may not tell the exact same story, but it’s definitely possible to reconcile between them and narrow it down to the understanding of talent needs that represents both the qualitative and the quantitative aspects.
Is there anything you see that recruiters, internal or otherwise, do regularly that makes you think, “No, stop doing that!”?
That’s an easy one for us to think about, but difficult for some recruiters to do: they should stop acting on their instincts. We see a lot of recruiters that take pride in their great people instinct. They “know a great employee when they see one.” The data tells a completely different story. People’s instincts lead to biases and bad hires — there is no other way to put it. Companies need to build their recruitment processes to minimize the use of instinct as much as possible.
With so much noise and competition out there, what are your top 3 ways to attract and engage the best talent in an industry
when they haven’t already reached out to you?
- Reduce the hard skill and the education requirements. These are limiting factors that are also not the best predictors of job success. Focus instead on the potential, the ability to learn, the ability to communicate. This will give you access to a much wider talent pool
- Offer development opportunities. Focus on the development as early as possible. Make it the focal point of your hiring brand.
- Offer good compensation and work/life balance (like remote work whenever possible). This is what the new generation of workers is looking for.
What are the three most effective strategies you use to retain employees?
- Start with managers. The most common reason people leave is because of a bad manager. Promote managers internally. Identify who has a high potential for success as a manager, educate them, make sure they are well steeped in the company culture and that this culture prioritizes Support, Value, Voice, Engagement, and Happiness.
- Make sure that retention thinking is built into your talent acquisition strategy. The right fit for a job is a key for job satisfaction. Job fit is not just an employee fitting the job criteria, but also the job fitting the employee’s needs.
- Development again. Nobody wants to be stuck in life or in a job. If employees don’t learn anything new in their jobs, if they don’t see a growth potential — they leave.
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? Please share an example for each idea.
1. The number one thing to do is understand what measures the success of your talent. To use another quote: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” The simplest example is sales professionals. They usually have very specific KPIs. Well, not everybody does sales, but everybody needs to have an objective and measurable indication of success. If you can do that, you are halfway to being able to identity the best talent.
2. Learn from the data about your current employees. The best predictor of the future is the past. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got. Machine learning and AI has a lot to offer these days in order to make this learning more effective. Talk with Cangrade — this is what we do.
3. Use the data driven step as early in the recruitment process as possible. Make sure it’s using the most fundamental qualities as success predictors (like personality, motivation, cognitive skills, etc.) and not the superficial ones (like hard skills, education, and experience). I’m not saying hard skills and experience are unimportant, but they should definitely not be the first criteria. And overall, you can loosen these requirements.
4. Engage the high potential candidates. Give them human touch and utilize the understanding of each candidate to make this interaction as relevant as possible. The more understanding you have of who you are talking with, the more your candidates will be willing to share more with you. In order to make the right talent acquisition decisions, you need to know as much as possible about your prospective hires.
5. Prioritize employee development as one of the main aspects of the talent acquisition. As a company, you need people who can grow, and as an employee you want to see yourself growing. It’s never too early to start the development process. It’s one of the most obvious win-wins.
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.
From a selfish prospective, I’d love to have coffee with thinkers like Sabine Hossenfelder and chat about physics, or Timothy Snider to chat about history or Yuval Noah Harari to chat about the future of Humankind. Unfortunately, I doubt any of them will see this interview. It’s more important though, from the impact perspective, for me to connect with business leaders. In particular, those who stand at the helm of large organizations. These kinds of discussions lead to the best outcomes. It’s the meeting of what is possible with what is needed. If I could get some of those meetings as a result of this interview, it would be great!
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Thank you so much for these fantastic insights!
