The Leadership Line

Unmasking the HR Urban Legend That's Killing Your Culture

• Tammy Rogers and Scott Burgmeyer • Season 6 • Episode 21

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Ever wondered why that technically brilliant hire turned out to be your biggest management headache? In our fascinating conversation Scott and Tammy reveal the critical blind spot in most hiring processes that leads organizations to repeatedly bring on problematic employees.

The shocking truth? Skills and experience account for just 10-12% of what determines someone's success in your organization. Yet most companies stubbornly focus their entire hiring process on these technical qualifications while neglecting the behavioral aspects that truly determine workplace fit. This fundamental disconnect explains why organizations routinely find themselves terminating employees not for skill deficiencies but for being "jerks at work."

Through a practical exercise exploring the HR Director role, Scott and Tammy demonstrate how organizations readily address skill gaps through development or termination, but frequently tolerate destructive behaviors that damage team dynamics and organizational culture. They also debunk a pervasive HR urban legend – that legally compliant interviews must use identical questions for every candidate – which prevents interviewers from truly understanding potential hires.

The solution? A more dynamic, human-centered approach to interviewing that explores not just what candidates can do, but who they are, what they value, and how they'll behave in your unique environment. When you align behaviors and values with technical qualifications, retention and performance dramatically improve. Ready to transform your hiring success rate from 12% to 80%? Listen now to discover exactly how to interview for the whole human, not just their resume.

Karman:

Good morning Tammy and Scott.

Tammy:

Good morning Karman.

Scott:

Good afternoon Karman.

Karman:

He's so slow. Scott's always on a different wavelength.

Tammy:

Yeah, and he's so slow. We move from morning to afternoon.

Scott:

Yeah, Time is but a construct.

Tammy:

Oh gosh.

Karman:

Well, you know, last week one of the things that you touched on, tammy, was about some thoughts about hiring, and I thought that was kind of ironic because I'd had a topic on our list about that very thing, about hiring, and there's something I saw on LinkedIn that I didn't really understand and I thought, oh, I'll ask Tammy and Scott what do these terms mean?

Scott:

And I hope we didn't post it no, it was.

Karman:

Um. Somebody was talking about the distinction between skill-based hiring and experience-based hiring, and implying that one of those things was a more contemporary point of view at a particular company. What do those terms mean to you, and does this make any sense? Scott's shaking his head.

Scott:

I'm shaking my head because they're both stupid ways to hire.

Scott:

Tell me more, scott, and again, I don't know the post, so I don't know exactly what their definition is. I can tell you my reaction when I hear it. When I think of skill-based hiring, I think what is your experience, what are your knowledge, skills, abilities which could be like resume could be education could be you've got to code this, or you have a CPA, certifications or whatever. You know you've got to code this, or you know you have a CPA, certifications or whatever. What I think experience-based hiring is what's your pedigree? Where have you been? What have you done? And if those are the primary things, oh wow, this is going to sound really bad. Then I would anticipate you probably suck at hiring.

Tammy:

Then I would anticipate you probably suck at hiring, okay, so here's here's, don't hold back, here's what's really it's so.

Scott:

It's so narrow. Now again, that's using my definition and my reaction to those terms, okay, so.

Tammy:

So, if you throw this into AI or into Google, okay, just so you know it comes up and it says experience-based hiring and skill-based hiring is the same thing. Okay, so, let's just start here and just kind of laugh about that particular thing, right? Really, what it is is it's going back to this kind of thing that's been around a long time in HR and it's like what are the competencies that are necessary for this job? Okay, so I have to be able to fill in the blank in order to be successful, and what I will tell you is that there are organizations that spend a lot of time talking about competencies in terms of what makes someone successful in this position. So, just for a minute, let's the three of us play. Okay, let's name some competencies that are typical, right, the typical competencies that someone would come in and put on someone. Okay, and let's just see what we come up with. All right. So, scott, give me let's just a job title. Let's start there.

Scott:

Oh, let's just say HR director.

Tammy:

HR director? Okay, love it. All right. So a competency, a skill set that an HR director needs to have in order to be successful. Karman, give me one Ability to recruit. Okay, so I need to have a recruiting skill. What is the four steps of recruiting? Okay, scott. What's another competency?

Scott:

I need to be able to interview.

Tammy:

Okay, oh, I have to have really good interviewing questions in that spot. And I'm going to add a third one I have to understand the laws around. You know recruiting and interviewing, right? So what are the laws so that we are keeping our organization safe and we don't get ourselves into legal trouble because there are do's and don'ts? Okay, now, that is really typical, right? These are the skill sets. Now question for you guys If I have an HR director and they cannot effectively recruit, they cannot effectively interview and they don't understand the laws around HR, what are we going to do to them? It's a candidate, no, it's that. We've hired them. We've hired them.

Scott:

What do most organizations do, or what am I going to do?

Tammy:

What would an organization you know more than likely they would?

Scott:

They would develop them. Yeah, they'd grow them. They'd send them to classes. They might fire them.

Tammy:

If I have someone who can't do these things, guys, we fire them. Okay, they are the basic quote, quote, unquote competencies because can't do it. Now, some people might put up with it. But, guys, if I have an HR director that can't recruit, can't interview and they don't understand the laws, pretty quickly we're going to be dissatisfied and we're going to get rid of them. Okay, but we end up keeping people right, Even when they can recruit, even when they can interview, even when they, you know, understand the laws. We end up keeping people that we shouldn't. What are the things that this HR director might be doing, even though they're competent at those three particular skill sets? What are they doing? That is like it's really harmful for the organization, Scott, what might they be doing?

Scott:

They're a jerk face to others.

Tammy:

Yeah, they're a jerk at work. Okay, all right. So specifically, Karman, how are they being a jerk at work?

Karman:

They're not keeping confidential conversations confidential.

Tammy:

All right. So we have a human resource person that has loose lips Okay, right, loose lips, okay. And in fact, sometimes they themselves are stirring the pot, okay, or they sometimes are gossiping about others and not giving them that spot. Now I can tell you we've seen lots of HR directors, unfortunately, who are jerks at work, who sometimes have loose lips, who sometimes are actually not helping people succeed, but actually talking about what they're not doing in terms of helping them not succeed in that particular case, or pitting people against each other because I like you and I don't like you, right? Really typical. I like you and I don't like you, right? Really typical.

Tammy:

We don't typically have competencies, skills or experience-based things that get at that. That's behavioral, okay, and yes, I know that that is an old-fashioned word for interviewing and hiring, but the fact of the matter is we have people who are still working for us that suck at behaviors and are really good at skills, and those are the people that are causing us problems inside of an organization. And if you're just hiring for skills and experience, you're going to get stuck with behavior problems, and that's a much more difficult thing inside of an organization, much more painful, and organizations are less apt to take action on behaviors, even though they should, even though they can. They are less apt to take action on behaviors than when they don't have the skill sets, and so we end up with a whole bunch of jerks at work, jerk faces.

Scott:

And for me, what's fascinating about this is anytime I have yet to have the experience. When I ask how, like when you look at their turnover data why do they fire people? It is almost never about a skill set or an experience thing. It is almost all behavioral. They didn't show up or they were. You know, I was at an organization this week. They had an employee threaten another employee and they fired them, oh they did they fired them.

Scott:

Yeah, they fired them. It was great. Yeah, it was fantastic, you know. But when you look at it, you know. So you start to look at it. You say, well, you're firing people for all these behavioral things, but you're not selecting people based on these behavioral things, right? Maybe just like I don't know weird thing. Maybe you want to change that. It was just random thought.

Tammy:

So I love that. First of all, if they are terminating folks based upon being jerk faces, congratulations. If your organization is doing that, you're ahead of the curve. However, if you're continuing to have to fire people because of behavioral issues, it means that you're not hiring well and in the end, you're not getting at the root of the issue.

Tammy:

You're not interviewing to find out who this person is. You're probably interviewing for skills and experiences, not for who are you as a human being. People think that they can't do that in an interview. You absolutely can.

Scott:

And there are tools to support you on that and there are techniques. So when I think about it, tammy, I think of okay, I would like to be able to use an assessment to understand a bit about them. I also want to interview, you know, behavioral-based interviewing that are aligned to our values as an organization, because those are the things that really define are they a jerk face or not?

Tammy:

And the piece that and this gets me. So we worked with an organization last year. They ask the same questions in every interview. This is a big, huge organization. They have asked the same questions for 20 years because human resources says these are the questions that you ask and they want every interview to be the same. So we ask those questions in the same order and there's no follow-up.

Tammy:

Okay, now, how soon before? Everybody knows that there's right answers to those questions and wrong answers to those questions. And so, hey, you get that information. The next thing know, you are simply going okay, I, I've prepped, here's the right answers, I know how to answer them. And then you wonder why your turnover, in this particular case, was sitting at in the 80 percentile in an annual year. Okay, because they would just hire people who had the right answers to these four questions that they have asked for 20 years. We have learned some. First of all, don't use the same questions. Second of all, don't make them the questions that you can get answers to on Google or an AI. Third, listen carefully. What are the follow-up questions? Your follow-up questions are the places where you can dig deeper and have a much deeper understanding of this human being and there is nothing legally that says you have to ask the same questions exactly in the same way to the same people. That is a very gross overstatement of what you can and cannot do, are you?

Scott:

saying that is an HR urban legend.

Tammy:

That is a HR urban legend that, by the way, somebody who was so ultra conservative put these rules in place and in fact, that rule is hurting you and you are wondering why we can't find the right people. It's because your interviewing process is not helping you find out who this human being is. You want them to be successful and you you don't want to bring someone in to have them take your job, not take another job and not be successful. That sucks for them, but it also sucks for you as an organization in terms of what it costs to go through this whole process again. So, hey, let's get real in our interviews. Let's not make it such that they can show you a false like human being simply to get the work done. And it means you have to be better at interviewing and your process has to be better. So it's not skills or experience, guys, it's let's get to know the human being. So what do we want to call that Like human interviewing, right?

Scott:

Well, I would love to just call it interviewing.

Tammy:

Effective interviewing right, so we know, skills, experience, education. What is it, scott Like 10%, 12% of the equation?

Scott:

Yeah, I think it's 10 or 12, something like that.

Tammy:

Right. The rest of it is how does this human being and how they see the world, what they value, what's important, match up with how we as an organization this is our culture, this is what the situation is, this is how we are going to behave and interact with one another. And when those two things match and you get the experience, the education, the license, you have a really good chance of having. And when we say really good chance in the 80 percentile chance of having that person come, be effective, stay with you for a long time. But if all you're worried about is kind of that experience, that education, that license, that set of skill sets, the fact of the matter is you've got about 10, 12 percent chance that they're going to be around and effective for you in a long-term relationship.

Tammy:

So yeah, Karman, I haven't read this article. I want to now and I'll go back and take a look at it. I'm not sure how they defined experience and skills, but I will tell you. I think that that is the least of what we have to worry about. I think it is this other stuff that is so much more critical.