Hiring Well is Key to Growing Business

By Jim Moody, CAE
CSA President and CEO

Last week I mentioned the importance of hiring well and gave a pretty egregious example of hiring gone wrong. Today, I’d like to shift gears and talk about what it means to hire well.

I’m not talking about the basic HR functions. Things like ensuring you ask only legal questions in the interview, following through with drug tests and background checks, getting them to sign the employee handbook and the like are all important aspects of hiring. The truth is, however, that this is the easy part. You can be compliant and still preside over a band of idiots (and I say that in the nicest possible way). How much thought have you put into ensuring that your staff is as focused as you are on making the business successful?

I recently had an opportunity to listen to Jim Collins talk about “the people issue.” Collins wrote “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” out of research that he and his students at the University of Colorado conducted. Unlike many books written by business professors, these are very readable. I encourage you to read them or at least read the summaries .

Here are some of the points I heard him make that I thought really applied to hiring and managing employees in our industry.

- Hire clock makers, not time-tellers.
- Work is infinite but time is finite. Make sure your folks are know how to determine the important things.
- A great organization is likely to die from indigestion caused by too much opportunity rather than from starvation of too few ideas. It is far better to be great at our foundational tasks than to be always chasing something new.
- First who, then what. Building and developing the right people are the keys to business success. If you are the only person who can “think,” then the business is limited to how hard you can work. Even the greatest workaholic only has 24 hours in the day.
- Turbulence is your friend. It exposes strengths and weaknesses. Success during turbulent times is directly related to your actions in prior good times. (It’s a little late to do anything about this one now, but it’s an important point to keep in mind when times are good again.)
- Those who do better in unpredictable times aren’t better at predicting. They realize they can’t possibly predict uncertainty. The best way to prepare is to have the right people on your team. Companies that went from great to good to bad to irrelevant to dead had one thing in common: a high percentage of key seats in the company held by ineffective people.
- People either share your core values or they don’t. They can’t be taught. Someone with a poor work ethic may be able to hide it for awhile, but eventually it comes out. A corner-cutter is always a corner-cutter.
- The “right” people do not need to be tightly managed. That’s not to say that they don’t need to be trained or mentored. But, with good instructions and training, the “right” people will do the job better without being micromanaged. If you are a micro-manager because you feel that you have no other choice, you’ve made poor hiring decisions.
- “Right” people don’t have a job; they have responsibilities. For them, job descriptions are somewhat irrelevant. They understand the concept of doing whatever it takes, and you don’t have to explain it to them.
- The “right” people have only one response to a commitment: fulfillment. They carry through on what they say they will do without you harping on it.
- The “right” people have a passion for your business. You can’t create that in them. You might motivate them with a reward for awhile, but you can’t create passion. It’s intrinsic.

Do you have the “right” people in your key seats today? If not, what are you going to do to get the right people there? When it’s time to hire again, how can your interviews help you discern who is “right” and who is not?

I know that it’s easy for me to talk about this when I don’t have to walk a mile in your shoes. I don’t know what it’s like to have sales drop by 75%. I don’t know what it’s like to hire manual laborers at minimum wage. I don’t know what it’s like to have employees not show up for work on Monday because they are drunk, high or in jail. All that’s true. But what I do know is that we all want our businesses to thrive. We want them to be better next year than they are today. And when we once again are setting records for sales, we’ll still have goals for the company to do better.

And I know this: there has never been a better opportunity to re-make your company. And if you don’t put thought into it right now, you will find yourself with exactly the same company next year and the next. I encourage you to visit http://www.jimcollins.com/ for more on the importance of finding the right people, how to be a better leader (which is, in turn, more attractive to better employees), and how to take your company from good to great. The resources on that site are free.