Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

When you’re trying to hire great people under pressure, you need to think strategically. You’re competing with other employers in the recruiting marketplace. You’re also working against the clock. You can’t waste your time and energy looking for people who have characteristics that your new hires don't really need to have. You have to focus on finding what truly matters.

Let’s break down the factors we all look for when recruiting new employees:

• Character. Traits such as honesty, reliability, maturity, work ethic, and tenacity.
• Personality. Whether a candidate is fun-loving or serious, gregarious or shy, optimistic or pessimistic, and so forth.
• Aptitude. The innate strengths a candidate possesses, including things like general intelligence, mathematical ability, or a gift for music.
• Skills. These are the abilities a person gains through experience or education, such as writing advertising copy, working with Excel, or playing the flute
• Experience. Whether the candidate has previously done the same job for another company.
• Education. What degrees or certifications the candidate has earned through formal education and from which schools they were earned.

If your company is like most, your recruiters are probably focusing too little on the items at the top of the list and focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list. There are two problems with this:

1. Almost every other company in the world is also focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list, because most companies place far too much weight on credentials and pedigree. So you’re competing with everyone else for the same limited supply of candidates with experience and education, making it harder for you to hire good people quickly.
2. The items at the top of the list are way more important than the items at the bottom of the list. So even when you finally do hire experienced, educated employees, you may not be hiring the people who can best help you succeed.

In a nutshell, the smart strategy is to focus your recruiting efforts on the first three items on the list, and then, as much as possible, substitute your own excellent training program for the bottom three items.

Let’s take a closer look at the factors to see why:

Character, Personality, and Aptitude. This is where your focus needs to be in hiring because hiring is the only way you can get these traits into your organization. The only way to get sound character, delightful personality, and strong aptitude into your organization is by hiring it. You can maybe improve your employees’ character and personality a little bit through coaching, preaching, and role modeling, but if you hire poor character and negative personalities you’ll be fighting an uphill battle, while if you hire sound character and positive personalities everything you do as a manager will be far easier and more successful. And aptitude is a fixed trait. You simply can’t increase an employee’s baseline intelligence and ability through coaching and training. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Skills. These are handy in a new hire, but they are less important than the first three in recruiting because they are not fixed qualities. You can add skills to your employees after you hire them by providing your own high-quality classroom and on-the-job training. This was the primary solution we used in the situation described in the previous post. We built an extensive training program of exceptionally high quality. It combines classroom, mock office, and on-the-job training over a one-year period. It took a lot of work to build and we suffered through some short-term sacrifice while we built it, but it has proven to be the foundation of our long-term success. It allows us to focus on hiring people with outstanding character, personality, and aptitude. This gives us a huge advantage over our competitors in building an excellent staff.

Experience. Previous experience in a similar position is less important than skills. If we happen to hire someone who already possesses relevant skills it’s a bonus, but usually those skills were acquired doing a very different job. For example, even though we're not a medical provider some of our positions require medical knowledge, so if someone previously worked in a clinic or hospital that's an advantage. However, previous experience doing the same job we're hiring for is often a negative. In fact, for certain positions we're extremely reluctant to hire anyone with directly relevant experience. It’s easier for us to train someone from scratch. They aren’t full of lousy ideas and bad habits from previous employers.

Education. It’s highly likely that you and your company are currently placing too much emphasis on educational credentials in your hiring, because almost all companies do. You can immediately start hiring better employees for most positions by requiring less education. It’s painful for me to say this because I’m a big supporter of higher education, but it’s true. I’ve done my own internal research and proved it to myself. When my competitors require college degrees to even apply for certain positions I’m delighted, because it means there's a huge pool of smart, hardworking, wonderful people who can only work for me.

You may be thinking:

• "This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."
• "I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."
• "How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."
• "Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

These are all good points. Tune into the third and final installment of this series of posts, in which I'll address these and other items of interest.

Here is part three of this series.

Comments

[CMR]

Being willing and able to work hard is one of the best assets an employee can have. No amount of skills, experience and education can make up for a poor work ethic.