The Skills Gap Is A Lie — Part 3
How employers can find hidden gems by not falling for the lie
In my first post on this topic I introduced why the conversation on the skills gap misses the point. And I talked about what individuals can do to bridge the gap in my second post of this series. Today I want to talk about what employers can do to look beyond the skills gap.
Being able to staff the right talent is critical for any organization and people are not like cereal you can pick up from the grocery store shelf. So I hope this post provides some useful guidance on how to hire and also an understanding to prospective hires on what a prospective employer should be looking for. All you need to do is these three things:
- Know what you’re looking for
- Find the rough diamonds
- Bring out their brilliance
Know What You’re Looking For
Let’s understand this problem in the context of what are the skills we need to look for. I had referenced the definitions provided by the Chief Learning Officer magazine, so let’s look at them again:
Perishable skills : Half-life < 2.5 years — Specific technology skills that are updated frequently; organization-specific policies and tools and specialized processes all can be classified as perishable skills.
Semi-durable skills : 2.5 years <Half-life < 7.5 years — These tend to be those frameworks with base sets of knowledge from which field-specific technologies, processes and tools arise.
Durable skills : Half-life > 7.5 years — They constitute a base layer of mindsets and dispositions. They include skills like design thinking, project management practices, effective communication, leadership which are more foundational in nature.
Perishable Skills: From the definition above we know the perishable skills are the ones that we should care the least about. They are also the skills we inevitably end up caring the most about despite not wanting to. It is why resumes have largely been replaced with keyword bingo. Because it is tangible, easy to describe and capture. But it reminds of the story of the man who was looking for his wallet under the streetlamp where there was light rather than where he dropped it.
Everything that counts cannot be counted, and everything that can be counted doesn’t count — Albert Einstein so in reality Anonymous
The perishable skills are usually a gap that can be met with a few weeks of preparation. Oh, you need someone now or else your project will collapse. Interesting you say that. Will you be able to find a replacement in a week? Will they be able to understand your systems and processes within a week? Hell, will you be able to let them do any actual work in the first week? SO why worry about a skill that can be picked up in a week.
Durable Skills: These are the most valuable skills and the hardest to learn. They are forged over a lifetime of growth, dedication, and learning. You can create an environment that can foster and grow these durable skills but there is no training someone can take that will make them more accountable, more hard-working, more sociable, better design thinker.
This is an amalgam of talent, experience, and wisdom. I am a firm believer in a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. But that means over a period of multiple years people can grow. Using a completely out of place analogy from my experience playing Kerbal Space Program. When you apply thrust, you will over time change velocity, which will change your trajectory so over a longer period of time it changes your destination. The fruits from growth mindset are acquired over a long period of time. And so while I strongly believe to a large extent people change. This change is very slow and an employer should not expect to be able to bank on it.
It is however, essential for an employer to provide opportunities for growth. That marks the difference between a place where you can build a career, or where you can make a quick buck.
Semi-Durable Skills: I left these for the end because of the nuance they carry. It’s also the category that was the hardest for me to gain an appreciation for. The durable skills are the ones that have excited me the most. And the cool thing is to a large extent they are spread in people at all experience levels (read cost). But the semi-durable skills are different. They are not about character. Rather they are about having an intuition for finding the right solution to the problem based on years of experience having solved similar problems. John Boyd in his works describes this using the German word “Fingerspitzengefühl”. Chet Richards, in the book “Certain To Win” describes it as:
Zen and other oriental philosophies talk at great length about intuitive knowledge, but they also stress that it comes through years of experience and self-discipline. In medieval Japan, samurai warriors practiced with the long sword until it became as an extension of their arm.
The durable skills of an individual will help in how long it takes you to acquire a certain amount of mastery. And they also define the upper bounds to the level of mastery you can attain. But they define the difference between a diamond in the rough and a cut diamond. This is what you pay for when you pay for experience. To acquire it would don’t need to find an exact match. You need to find a board match. This is also what turns resume keyword searches from bad into a complete disaster. I would like you to have some familiarity with architecting on the cloud, so any experience you have with AWS, Azure, GCP would be beneficial. Oh and Kubernetes isn’t really the cloud, but as an abstraction layer you solve many of the same problems. Come to think of it I’ll also take mesosphere. Just any of these will work. And then you end up with the candidates that have the dreaded “Experience in” (logged into once), “Understanding of” (Friend told them this is something useful), “Expert understanding of” (Asked the friend back why it’s useful) in all the platforms but no one that has fingerspitzengefühl over the subject matter.
One thing I have to mention about this. This is the actual knowledge that is useful to be present in the group. So you only need enough people to have this knowledge to lead the group. Your brilliant cut diamonds will thrive while working alongside your rough diamonds and vice versa.
Find The Rough Diamonds
I believe this topic deserves a separate post but your interview process needs to expose what you’re looking for. Your primary goal should be seeing if they have the durable skills you need. Many years ago Silicon Valley had decided the only way to do this was to subject the person to a battery of puzzles and riddles. Which provides a very good indication of how many books on puzzles they read to prepare for the interview. But thankfully they are being phased out now.
This is as we started the discussion always a hard question. So here are some tips although admittedly I’ve been spectacularly wrong in the past.
Ask Socratic Questions: During interviews I usually focus on a line or two of the resume. I innocuously ask them what it is. And have a conversation based on their answer. Asking more questions. Have them teach me along the way. Ask them to justify their decisions. Ask them to compare against some alternative. Hopefully I have gained the fingerspitzengefühl to be able to tell between the people than can play you like a fortune teller with their answers but no guarantees. By going through this I get a validation on the experience. I also get to understand how they think and how well they can communicate their ideas. And since it is over their experience I won’t be looking under the street light for something I know isn’t there.
This is going to be uncharted territory for you by definition. But don’t worry. You see unlike Socrates they actually want you to like them so they’ won’t try to kill you.
See Them Do Their Job: You should have a clear understanding of the qualities you are looking for in the candidates. What behaviors they should exhibit. Thought patterns they follow. As you’re having the Socratic conversation with them, make sure to observe if they’re matching what you’re looking for. In my engineer interviews I try to dig until I can find a problem I’d like them to program. So modification of the problem they’re describing. I expect them to negotiate with me on the reasonable of the questions, to clarify, and to discuss assumptions. And most importantly, I welcome them to use Google while they are screensharing so I can see how they will go about solving the problem in real life.
Tell Them What You’re Doing: So I’ve learned over the years that I really throw people off with my interviewing. This is how someone I hired thought about the interview:
I still remember my interview. Ali asking me about my hobbies and things I built in the past. I didn’t feel like he took the interview seriously, like he glanced at my resume last second and already decided I wasn’t worth interviewing. When it was almost over he asked me if I had any questions. I said yeah, you didn’t ask me anything about DevOps, or Jenkins or Terraform. He chuckled and said “Knowlege[sic] is cheap”.
Okay, well, really I was trying to impress you all with my magnum opus, the quip, “Knowledge is cheap”. Remember you first heard it here. But now that I’ve opened this topic many people especially less experienced people can be overwhelmed. And you are for the most part not wanting to learn how they handle the stress of an interview. So I make sure to offer some context that I’m trying to push you so you should feel uncomfortable. And that I’m not evaluating your knowledge but gauging your ability to learn. That way you get to see their true talent.
Bring Out Their Brilliance
Even more difficult is the job of bringing out the brilliance of your team members day in and day out. This is the primary responsibility of the leaders of the organization. It is also one of the most joyous parts of being a leader. I am not doing this topic justice and want to spend more time exploring it, but here are some brief thoughts on how to bring out the brilliance of your team:
Standards: Your team will always want to be working with similarly or more capable members. In particular for diligence and self-accountability. You need to not only consider the standards when hiring but diligently maintain them. Fix mistakes, provide coaching, clarify expectations.
Experimentation: For learning to be promoted in an environment you need to create a culture of experimentation. Making space for learning, taking risks, and accepting mistakes. You need to breed a genuine desire for continuous improvement both by hiring people with the right attitude and guiding them.
Mentorship: Strong mentorship ensures a high learning environment for everyone. It will help your teams get upskilled faster. And create a more fulfilling and and more welcoming environment for everyone.
Did I ever tell you that I hate conclusions. Usually I am already too tired by the end of the article to create a good conclusion. Fortunately, this one is long enough that none of you are actively reading. So I don’t have to put in the perfunctory “I hope you enjoyed this article and will be able to use these techniques in your day to day life.” Instead I will let the Muppets from Sesame Street do the talking.
You can find other parts of this article in the links below
In addition I wrote an article on how to interview that you might find useful
