Building a Winning Business – Hiring Process Reference Checking

Building-a-Winning-Business-Book

Building A Winning Business — Section: Hiring

Hiring someone is a highly human interaction. After all, it’s a matter of people coming together and making a decision to spend 40-plus hours a week together for an undefined period of time well into the future. It’s easy to let emotions, especially positive ones, tempt you into skipping your due diligence before offering a job to someone who appears ideal.

Here’s my advice: don’t let this happen to you.

  • No matter how impressive someone appears to be, you should always call his three most recent employers and ask questions that get the real story. Ask, “What did Bill do?” instead of, “Bill said he was a project manager who oversaw 20 employees. Is this true?” Open-ended questions ensure that you will get a more complete and accurate description of the candidate’s past job responsibilities and performance (some companies, however, maintain a strict HR policy of only confirming the dates of employment and the job titles a person had while in their organization).
  •  It also makes sense to get a professional outside assessment of your leading candidates. We spend about $300 per assessment, which provides us with an extensive overview of the candidate’s personality and allows us to decide whether the person will fit with our culture. Sound expensive? Think about the costs (both time and money) involved in a bad hire. Also, candidates are typically hired based on skill and fired because of personality.

Tom’s Takeaway:  “There are three places where you can’t always see someone’s true personality: on a first date, at church, and at a job interview. Increase your odds of hiring someone whose personality, values, and work ethic match your own by thoroughly checking him out before you extend an offer of employment.”

Thoughts Since the Book

A gated, defined hiring process is huge in building a solid organization.  A perennial discussion at Intertech is if our hiring process is too rigorous.  We’ve had candidates opt out because our process because it’s too long or involved.  I have counter thoughts:

  • It shouldn’t be easy to join an elite team.  Think Navy Seals.  The right candidates get this… along with having candidates opt out of our process, I’ve heard now employees state, “I knew this was a place for me when I saw how hard it was to make it through the hiring process.”
  • If we’re going to spend 1,000’s of hours working together, doesn’t it make sense to spend about 20 hours on the front end to ensure it’s a fit for both sides?

Building a Winning Business – Introduction

Building-a-Winning-Business-BookOver the course of the next year, I’ll be posting all the parts of my book Building a Winning Business:  70 Takeaways for Creating a Strong Company during Good and Bad Economic Times.

I’m working on a Second Edition of the book and will boost the Takeaways to 100.  If you thoughts on additional topics, leave a comment or fire me an email @ tsalonek at Intertech dot com.

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Introduction

(When writing this book) My primary goal was to create a single source that shares “How we do stuff at Intertech” for new employees and clients. Whether you’re running your own company, managing an IT department within a multinational corporation, or leading a software development team, it’s my hope that some of the ideas and information presented here may work for you.

As an entrepreneur who has operated a successful IT development and training company, my experience includes work with many different employees and Fortune 500 companies, governmental agencies, nonprofits, and a good number of small- to medium-sized firms.  In thinking about this book, I realized that despite their differences, all these organizations (including my own) are facing profound challenges—whether they realize it or not—due to the increasingly global nature of competition and what some are now calling “The Great Recession.”

One estimate from Forrester Research projects that by 2015 some 3.3 million professional positions will move offshore. Various economic prognosticators also are predicting the demise of entire industries as the inevitable outcome of the very entrenched economic downturn in which the world now finds itself.

On the employee side of the equation, things are also changing rapidly. Consider reputable predictions for Generation Y (as of 2010), which includes Americans older than five up to their early to mid-20s. Most will:

  •  Change careers (not simply jobs) five times
  •  Not be interested in long-term employment
  •  Expect leaders to be authentic
  •  Be as equally committed to their work as to their employer

What does all of this mean?

Things are changing! The upcoming workforce is a generation unlike any other and will stretch us in how we attract and retain talent. Our competition can as easily come from Bangalore as Boston or Burnsville, Minnesota. An uncertain economy makes forecasting and growth challenging at best. Yet, I believe, all these changes are good in the long term. They force us to get better at serving our customers and employers, cultivating our employees (and ourselves), and understanding our markets. In essence, they compel us to build the strongest organizations possible to compete in the largely uncharted business waters of the 21st century.

This book is far from an ivory tower treatise, although it is an attempt to share the proven strategies I’ve gleaned from nearly 20 years in the business world. It includes lessons gathered from the perennial “school of hard knocks,” as well as valuable lessons I’ve learned from respected executive education programs, graduate-level classes, and ideas from fellow entrepreneurs at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. A business thinker of particular influence worth noting and thanking here is Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

I’m certainly not a Stephen Covey or a Peter Drucker, but I have seen firsthand how effectively these strategies work at Intertech. Intertech has received more than 35 awards—for being one of the fastest-growing firms in America; for being one of the “best places to work,” according to Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal; and for excellence in our management practices. But the real proof is that Intertech has satisfied clients, great employees, and a profitable bottom line.

In The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman notes that to compete in the future, “We have to do things differently. We are going to have to sort out what to keep, what to discard, what to adapt, where to redouble our efforts, and where to intensify our focus.”

I hope this book helps you to do just that.

Getting Things Done. Just Do It!

Nike’s “Just Do It!” may go down in business books as one of the most successful corporate slogans of all times. Americans in particular seem intuitively to understand the simplicity and common sense behind this concise call to action. So why do so many companies have difficulty launching new ventures? Why do so many organizations bog down in “analysis paralysis,” leaving potential moneymaking new revenue ideas behind in the process?

In my book “Building a Winning Business,” takeaway #37 is titled “Just Do It!” In that short chapter I counsel readers that “It’s better to take action than to procrastinate while obsessing about perfection.” I also advise managers not to let things grind to a halt over a single issue. Business writers and educators Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown take this advice to a whole new level in their new book, Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2012).

Schlesinger is the president of Babson College. Kiefer is the president of Innovation Associates and Brown is a longtime contributor to The New York Times. Together, they have spent years studying how entrepreneurs “create new products, services and business models in situations where the old methods of analyzing, forecasting, modeling, planning, and allocating don’t work.”

Their bottom line: “Successful entrepreneurs don’t just ‘think different,’ they translate that thinking into immediate action, often eschewing or ignoring analysis. Rather than predict the future, they try to create it.”

In the four posts to follow, I will tell you about their findings (see the March 2011 Harvard Business Review for a more in-depth summary of their insightful new book) and share how this same logic has helped Intertech to move ahead in some key areas of our business

Book Takeaway Post: Verify the Story

First Date
Don’t expect to see someone’s true personality on a first date

An outside HR consultant once told me, “There are three places where you can’t always see someone’s true personality: on a first date, at church, and at a job interview.” This year, a Wall Street Journal article stated over 1 out of 10 people lie on their resume.  When it comes to recruiting talent, as the saying goes, “trust but verify.”

Verifying a job candidate’s history is a key part of the interviewing process.  Increase the odds of hiring someone whose personality, values, and work ethic match your own by thoroughly checking them out before extending an offer of employment.  At Intertech, we do multiple verifications/assessments:

  • Candidates complete an online personality assessment to determine fit to the job and our culture.  My experience shows, “People are hired for skill and fired for personality.”
  • Reference checks are done for the three past employers.  When performing reference checks, be sure to ask the questions correctly.  For example, don’t say “Frank said he was your top salesperson… is that true?” Instead, ask, “How did Frank stack rank compared to your other salespeople?” Just like in a casual conversation, open ended questions get better answers.
  • Near the final stage of the process, we perform a background check.  The Small Business Association has a complete list of background check options along with defining what’s legal for employers to screen.
  • For salespeople in particular, we request W2 copies for the past three years.   We match up what they said with what the W2 shows.  If there are discrepancies, we pass.

Consistently doing the above, helps us assess someone’s “real” personality.  If you’re reading this and still in the dating scene, try one or more of the above steps and let me know how it goes!

Book Takeaway Post: Have a Process

Steps
Take each step.  Don’t skip!

In a Harvard Business Review post on avoiding hiring disasters, it notes “A carefully crafted hiring process can help avoid most mishaps.” Further, “Needing to fill the role yesterday is not an excuse for shortchanging the process.”  Both of these ideas are what Takeaway #2, Have a Process, in my book is all about.

At Intertech, we have nine steps in our hiring process.  The steps are:

  1. Resume reviewed/screened
  2. Background interview
  3. Technical exam
  4. Topgrading interview
  5. Senior leadership interview
  6. Personality assessment
  7. Team interview
  8. Reference checks
  9. Background check

Along with following the process, in the same HBR article, it states “Screening for the right soft skills is critical.” I agree.  People are hired for skill and fired for personality.  Throughout our process, and particularly in steps #5, #6, and #7, we’re looking for a fit to our culture and values.

Finally, if we’re trying to talk ourselves into why this candidate is a good fit at any one of the steps, it’s probably a sign that they aren’t.