Hiring Top Performers, an Interview Guide

We are hiring.  Getting the right people is vital, obviously, to building a great team.

Building a great team starts with finding great people. Top firms spend an excessive amount of time recruiting.

One worldwide executive recruiting firm, Egon Zehnder International, conducts between 25 and 40 interviews per hire!  Most of us don’t have the time or resources to put job candidates through such a rigorous recruiting process. However, we can take the time to check out a potential new employee thoroughly before asking him or her to join our team. If you’re wowed by someone’s technical prowess but concerned about his or her honesty or attitude, don’t risk it. When we have justified hiring someone—usually in response to a hefty workload—the person may have provided short-term relief but did not work out in the long term.

We have an eight-step process. An essential step in our approach uses an interview from the book Top Grading.  Here’s a link to that interview.

Employee Engagement: Trust with Co-Workers

Here are a couple of questions around coworker trust found on an engagement survey:

To help the leadership team understand how each of us are “wired”, we’ve all taken a personality assessment and created a cheat sheet which identifies the core ways we want to work with one another.

To create an environment of trust, as leaders, we need to let our team members know it’s O.K. to make mistakes. To create trust, we need to know each other as people. To do this, there should be a corporate calendar with scheduled business and social events.

Employee Engagement: Alignment with Goals

Below are a couple of questions that an employee would be asked about how they fit in the big picture:

The biggest way a leader misses the mark is tying the individual into the overall mission and goals for the organization’s success.

For mission and goals, as a leader, if we can’t explain how an employee fits into the big picture, we can’t expect them to!

Ditto on values… if we can’t succinctly say our values, we can’t our people to!

If you don’t have values firmly defined, Google “Jim Collins Martian Exercise” and use that as a plan to define your organization’s values.

For values to work, they need to be integrated into the fabric of the firm. Here are a few ideas we implement at Intertech to weave values into our day-to-day operations:

How do you get everyone on the same page with a goal for the company? Consider a theme! A theme is something company-wide. It could be around hiring, creating content, or whatever is needed to move the organization forward. Below are some thoughts on creating a theme:

Intertech Named the #4 Medium Sized Employer in Minnesota 

Image result for mspbj best places to work images

No. 4 Medium: Intertech Inc.

Intertech was named the #4 medium sized employer in Minnesota.  My thanks to our loyal customers and mega-dedicated team for making us possible.

Here’s an excerpt from the publication: “Software developer Intertech Inc. is receiving its 14th Best Places to Work this year. It’s one of the Business Journal’s winningest companies. Helping it attain this distinction are employee benefits that include three-month paid sabbaticals for every seven years of employment, a flexible work culture and selective hiring standards that focus on building a cohesive team.”

See the full article here.