When many enterprises fail, it is often said that policy changes, market changes, consumer demand changes, technological development changes and so on, which lead to the failure. In fact, this is all nonsense. It can be seen that talent is of great importance to an enterprise.
HR people in the Internet circle know that it is difficult to recruit talents from Toutiao. Even industry giants like BAT offer good conditions, and only a few talents can be recruited from Toutiao. Why is this?
Zhang Yiming, founder of Toutiao, said: it is not unreasonable that a good CEO should be a good HR first.
Zhang yiming is a programmer who is committed to code and is good at solving problems in the most rational way. He thinks, for the enterprise, universal, relatively long-term only talent, only talent in the company’s role is unchanged. He has also spoken about talent on several occasions.
Today, we will sort out four “people’s questions about big companies” that Zhang yiming once answered in detail, and see how he selects, employs and retains people.
Question 1: As companies get bigger and more complex, should they put more emphasis on processes? Is the system set as detailed as possible?
The business of the early companies should not be complicated, because the early companies only do products and technology, not marketing, PR, media cooperation, etc., so the business is very simple, but after the company grows, the business becomes more and more complicated, so it needs to recruit many people, and the talent team will be diluted. That’s when chaos starts to appear. What do you do?
It is more common to increase the complexity of the company, to add processes and rules, and to add processes to prevent things from going wrong. It’s a conventional solution, it solves the immediate problem, but it actually does a lot of damage in the long run. When you reprocess things, it slows things down in the company — it happens in many large companies, and companies become obsolete because they don’t innovate.
Because from the point of view of the rule-making department, the process and rules will be as thin as possible to avoid problems, but that will weaken the possibility of many optimal solutions. Because we might have a flexible, flexible situation, and if there are a lot of constraints, people don’t want to go to the optimal solution. Accumulated rules and processes can be a particularly big obstacle, especially when there are major changes in the industry and companies cannot move forward by inertia.
Is there no process required? This situation is even worse. Companies with processes tend not to be messy, just slow and rigid, whereas companies without process rules tend to be messy.
A better approach is to increase the density of talent, to increase the number of people who have a good view of the big picture, have good values, and are well-rounded in their knowledge and abilities.
If you hire people with poor understanding, the company’s policies have to be very detailed. But if faced with a group of high-quality talent, you can make the rules very simple, simple into a few principles. People cooperate according to principles rather than rules, and even act with common sense as long as they know the goal.
Rules are usually the easiest to add, because there’s always a company to refer to. Generally, it is ok to add rules when the industry is relatively stable and the model is unchanged. Many problems arise in a dynamic industry where rules solidify the way colleagues work together and limit flexibility.
That’s why a lot of companies can’t run anymore, because when the business grows and the rules are set, they rely on inertia to move forward. When the industry suddenly changes and big internal adjustments are needed, these inertia becomes a constraint.
In our opinion, an industry like Toutiao is an innovative industry, which will face constant challenges and changes, especially in these years. Therefore, we think we should reduce rules and keep the organization flexible to adapt to the development of the business.
So as companies grow and businesses increase, the core key is to have the density of talented people exceed the increase in business complexity. Our company sums this up as “doing challenging things with great people.” The things that are challenging are the ones that are increasingly complex and need to be done with good people.
Question two: How to prevent employees from being poached? How can a company’s talent system be set up to attract top talent and ensure retention?
The talent mechanism mainly includes three points. The first is return, which is short term return and long term return; The second is growth, he can grow in this company; Thirdly, he enjoys his spiritual life in the company and finds his work interesting.
In addition, the core is effective incentive strategies.
1. Provide the best ROI
We often see a term, human cost, and many companies think of talent as a cost lost. Especially frugal ceos think, I found this guy cheap, that’s great. But in fact, if comparing with the United States, the labor cost of the United States is very expensive, and the treatment of Chinese talents to the United States will be increased by two or three times. China, India and Cambodia have low labor costs but are still the best developed in the US. The core reason is that the US gets a better return by deploying good people, so the core point is not to look at cost, it’s to look at return and output.
The core of a company is to achieve the highest ROI by constructing good configurations and allocating good production factors, and to provide good ROI to everyone. Therefore, the core competition of a company is the level of ROI rather than the cost level. As long as ROI is good, more money means better returns, just like investing. So we keep telling HR that we want to pay top of the market.
We take the initiative to require the HR department to position the market compensation at least once a year to keep the market compensation leading in the industry. Of course, if the cost of manpower is high, in turn, the company must be able to deploy these people well, but this is an aggressive attitude.
2, the return to maintain a high enough ceiling, at any time to attract the creation of super value of the top talent to join the struggle
In my interviews in the past couple of years, candidates often say that Toutiao has been developing for a long time, and the best time to join has passed. We feel very depressed, if the bigger companies, good talent will not join the startup, the subsequent competitiveness will be limited.
Because typically in the early days companies would use an option system, and they would give engineers a very high percentage of options, but you wouldn’t be able to give a very high percentage of options later on because there were so many people. How to solve this problem?
I don’t think it’s the option that matters. It’s just the possibility of excess returns, the possibility of financial freedom. So the core is actually whether to provide excess return, whether to allow him to go up to a higher level of return. So we thought it was important to focus on incentives to increase the percentage of bonuses, so we said internally, we want very prominent people to have the opportunity to get 100 months of bonuses.
At this time, we should let him know that anytime he joins Toutiao, the return can be very, very high, and the platform resources are very good, which is more competitive than joining a start-up company.
I find a problem that the core of stock options in advance is not to reward employees’ business ability, but their investment ability. One’s return basically depends on when he joins which company, whether he wants more cash or more shares.
Maybe someone who’s doing a really good job, maybe they’re not in a good financial position, they come in and they ask for a lot of cash, and then even if they’re doing really well, they get a lot less return. I would actually encourage, if given the opportunity, to put more incentives after the fact, at the end of the year, to put more incentives related to personal contribution rather than investment vision.
3. Compensation shall be determined in accordance with position level evaluation and performance evaluation
We’ve done some statistics, and we’ve found that there’s often some sort of premium between pay and performance, the acquaintance premium, the newbie premium, the seniority premium, etc.
So the headline inside, according to the post level salary, job level to represent him in the professional field of stable output, we don’t let business executive compensation, executive jobs, only let him reference salary history, a company pay on whether he is what kind of, don’t let history pay influence the level of job evaluation. HR will give the offer based on the position level, the supply and demand relationship at the current stage and the intensity of competition.
Why do more and more companies emphasize the importance of HR?
In fact, a CEO should be an excellent HR. If a company is regarded as a product, there are three main inputs. The first is money, capital input. The second one is opportunity input, information input, what’s going on in the industry, what’s going to change, the CEO judgment; The third is talent input.
The output of a company is profit, service and product. Between the input and output, it depends on the quality of the input and the configuration of the input. Whether you use your money effectively, whether you use your talent effectively, that part is management. Input and management determine the output. After determining the direction of the company’s business, the most important input is to consider the input of talents.
In addition to the CEO to do HR, HR also need to be good HR. The current situation of the industry is that the threshold of HR is low. In my opinion, HR is not only recruiting, but also participating in the organization management of the company, assisting the CEO and business director in recruitment and talent allocation. In fact, you have to think deeply about the company, about organizational capabilities.
I think you can even say that human resources is really about the understanding of human resources. If you have a good understanding of your business goals and develop an understanding of your role, and you have a good understanding of the talent in the industry, the talent in the industry is yours, because the talent is mobile.
If a company doesn’t understand its talent properly, its talent isn’t its own. It is often the case that a person does not perform very well in this company and achieves great success in other companies or start-ups, which shows that he is not the talent of your company, because you have not correctly understood and used it.
If we set a very high standard for HR, I think it is far from being an excellent HR to write a book like How Google Works. If HR cannot understand How to organize and mobilize for efficiency, it is far from being an excellent HR to just do routine work such as recruitment.
Question 4: What kind of employees should the company value? Are there any common traits that top performers can identify?
I’ve interviewed about 2,000 young people in the last 10 years. After 10 years, some people still have a good trait, that is, “Stay young”. These people barely reach the ceiling.
If I were to summarize their common traits, I think the most important one is delayed gratification.
What is delayed gratification?
In the 1960s, there was a famous “Stanford Marshmallow experiment” in which children were given an immediate reward, such as one marshmallow, or waited a while and received two marshmallows.
Experiments have found that children who hold out longer for a preferred reward generally have better life performance, such as better SAT scores, educational achievement and body mass index.
Delayed gratification is the sacrifice of instant gratification, and the ability to display self-control while waiting, for a more valuable long-term outcome.
Zhang Yiming is such a person.
In 2016, zhang yiming gave a financial interview, in which the word “delayed gratification” appeared 10 times.
In one sentence, Zhang yiming said: “Half of the problems in many people’s lives are caused by this — no delayed gratification.
Let’s take a look at how Zhang yiming uses delayed gratification in his specific life practice. Hopefully, this article will also bring you changes in your actions and make you a better person.
1. The salary difference of three to five thousand dollars when I just graduated was really negligible
Choose what major, company, profession, development path, oneself should have judgment, do not be left and right by short-term choice.
For example, many people prefer to work for foreign companies rather than start-ups after graduation. Around 2006, many junior students asked me about my career choice, and I advised them to work for Baidu rather than IBM or Microsoft.
But in practice, many people go to foreign companies for short-term reasons, such as fame and better pay. When I graduated, there was a $3,000 or $5,000 difference, which was really negligible.
Short-term pay differentials don’t matter, but there aren’t that many people who can actually get rid of them with judgment.
I pay more attention to the nature of things, to the future of things, to see if it is good for the long term. It’s a waste of time if you only look at the short term.
I have concluded that when you are unable to choose and judge, you need to take a step further, so far as to use more important principles and a longer scale to measure it.
In 2016, Zhigang Li of New Business 100 asked me, “What key decisions have you made in more than three years, which helped Toutiao grow from 100 million dollars to 10 billion dollars?”
I think I made most of the important decisions in the first three months.
Delayed gratification determines whether you make judgments based on the long term or the short term.
Work does not divide you and me, work without boundaries, the second year after graduating from college, I will manage 40 or 50 people
In 2005, I graduated from Nankai University and joined Kuxun.
I started out as a general engineer, but by my second year, I was managing a team of 40 or 50 people at the company, doing all the back-end technology, as well as a lot of product-related work.
I grew quickly in my first job, not because I was the most skilled or experienced. There are two main reasons:
The first reason is that MY job doesn’t discriminate between you and me.
After I finished my own work, I did everything I could to help solve most of my colleagues’ problems. I read most of the Code in Code Base at that time. When a new guy comes on board, WHENEVER I have time, I explain it to him. And I grew myself by explaining it.
For the first two years of my career, I went home at 12:1 every day, went home and continued programming. I do it because I’m interested, not because the company wants me to.
So, I quickly went from being in charge of one module to being in charge of the entire back-end system, first with a team, then with a small group, then with a large department.
The second reason is that I never set boundaries.
At that time, I was in charge of technology, but when faced with product problems, I would actively participate in discussions and think of product solutions.
A lot of people say, this is not my job.
However, doing more things gives me great exercise:
The experience of product participation was of great help to my later transformation into a product; Being involved in the business part has helped me a lot as a company now; The experience of meeting customers with the sales director is very helpful for me to build the sales team of Toutiao.
Here’s another counterexample. I had a former colleague who had a good theoretical background, but he always finished his work and left the office.
He stayed at the company for more than a year, but didn’t understand the new technologies and tools online. He needs someone to help him with the second half, because he can only do the first half himself. If the front end, back end, algorithm to master, at least some understanding of the words, so a lot of debugging analysis, a person can do.
Delaying gratification makes you more willing to do more, to get more exercise, rather than wondering if this is my right thing to do.
3. Young people should aim higher than just buying an apartment in Beijing
I went to college with and worked with a lot of very good people, with better skills and better grades than ME, but 10 years on, many of them have not lived up to my expectations.
Why is that? Many people don’t set high goals after graduation.
Some students join the IT department of the bank, just to solve the Beijing hukou quickly, or at that time some institutions have housing subsidies, can buy affordable housing.
Do you have a Beijing hukou? Can I buy an affordable apartment? If you don’t settle for mediocrity and aim high, you don’t have to worry about it.
If you graduate, set your goal to buy a small two-bedroom or three-bedroom apartment within the fifth ring Road of Beijing. If you spend all your energy on it, your work will suffer. Your behavior changes and you don’t want to take risks.
For example, I saw a former friend who did some part-time jobs to earn some income. Those part-time jobs are actually unskilled and have an impact on his job, both on his career development and on his mental state. When I asked him why, he said, “Hey, hurry up and make a down payment.”
I think he looks like he made a profit, but he actually lost.
In addition, young people should live in the city center, even if the house is smaller, there are more communication and activities in the city, and they don’t need to waste their time and precious energy to crowded subway after work. Don’t be in a hurry to settle down in the suburbs when you’re young. I also recommend moving downtown after you buy a house.
If you delay gratification, you’re going to have higher goals, higher standards, and maybe you’re slow in the first two years, but 10 years from now, it’s going to be very different.
When I graduated, I wanted to do something challenging with good people. A lot of people say, “I’m going to make my first million. I’m going to make a lot of money starting my own business.”
To be honest, I don’t have a particularly strong desire for money. There was only one feeling, to do something interesting and challenging, with good people.
These last few years I feel like I’m relearning, or catching up on things I should have learned as a teenager:
How to read, how to get to know yourself, how to communicate with others, how to manage your time, how to put others’ opinions in perspective, how to motivate yourself, how to write, how to exercise consistently, how to be patient.
The trait I most admire in myself is delayed gratification, and the greatest delayed gratification is mental.
The author | wisdom elder brother
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