Building a Winning Business Archives

Building a Winning Business – Hiring Process Reference Checking

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.”

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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 – 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.

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.