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Building a Winning Business – Have a Process

Building A Winning Business — Section: Hiring

You probably wouldn’t choose a college for your child or even a new car for yourself without doing diligent research. Your process would include talking with many people, doing some Internet sleuthing, keeping a spread sheet showing key comparative data, and the like. Hiring a new employee requires the same diligence.

• To ensure the best hiring result, use consistent questions that all candidates must answer. You’ll find it will be much easier to compare candidates if you have an “apples to apples” set of responses. Vary the settings when interviewing the same candidate multiple times. If the potential employee will have substantial client contact or need to interact with top levels of management, for example, take him or her to lunch to observe social skills and table manners. It’s also smart to involve multiple people from different parts of the organization in the process. At Intertech, the final interview involves the prospect’s meeting with two employees for a team interview.

• The hiring process is designed to primarily elicit important information from job candidates. It’s also important, however, to provide clear information about your organization’s culture, values, and expectations. When the process is done correctly, weak prospects drop out because they’ve learned enough about your company to realize it will not be a good fit—saving valuable time and money for all involved. We’ve taken this part of the hiring process a step further at Intertech by creating a “Complete Guide to a Career with Intertech” booklet, which describes everything a prospect should know about our company before making a decision to join us.

Tom’s Takeaway: “A thorough, consistently applied hiring process will increase your odds of finding solid employees who fit your culture.”

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Thoughts Since the Book:

The great thing about having a process is it creates a baseline for change and improvement. As recent as last week, we’ve made a change to hiring improve our process.

What it Takes to Make a Great Workplace

Below is an infographic from Intertech on what it takes to make a great workplace.

Building a Winning Business – Hire Slowly

The following is the first chapter from my book Building a Winning Business. As noted, I’m working on a section edition. See the notes that follow for additional thoughts about additions and revisions.

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Chapter 1 — Hire Slowly

Building A Winning Business — Section: Hiring

Building a great team starts with finding great people. Top firms spend an inordinate amount of time recruiting. One worldwide executive recruiting firm conducts between 25 and 40 interviews per hire. A leading financial services company interviews a single potential employee up to 200 times before extending a job offer!

Most of us don’t have the time or resources to put job candidates through such a rigorous recruiting process. We can, however, take the time to check out a potential new employee thoroughly before asking him to join our team.
If you’re wowed by someone’s technical prowess but concerned about his honesty or attitude, don’t risk it. When we have justified hiring someone—usually in response to an especially heavy workload—he may have provided short-term relief but he did not work out in the long term.

Tom’s Takeaway: “Avoid hasty hires. While it may seem like a simple solution in the short term, you’ll end up paying more and spending more time on the process in the long run, since employees hired in a hurry rarely make a good fit.”

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Thoughts Since the Book:

Right people are 99% of the reason for business success. Taking time to make sure we get the right people is one of the simplest and best ways to have business sanity, success, and profits.

Building a Winning Business – Introduction

Over 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.

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History’s 15 Worst Named Tech Products

Check out the following post on Intertech’s blog…

What’s in a name? If we’re talking about some of the products on the list you’re about to read: some really bad ideas. While not all of History’s 15 Worst Named Tech Products failed because of their christening, they certainly didn’t help themselves out by choosing the names they did. From bad hygiene admissions to inadvertent racism, we proudly give you the worst of the worst.