The Value of a Good Employee

I read today in Dale Dauten's Great Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success that in regards to hiring employees "One great person equals three good people." This is one of the founding principles of Kip Tindell's The Container Store chain. Following Tindell's logic, you can pay a great employee double and still come out ahead.

This is a reminder to me of the importance of making good hires. 

Interview Effectively

I'm reading a book called Hire and Keep the Best People by Brian Tracy. Here's a few things that stood out to me from chapter five:

• Write out a logical sequence for the interview. The first questions are aimed at getting information about the WORK EXPERIENCE of the candidate as it applies to the job under consideration. Then ask questions to ascertain the SKILL LEVEL of the candidate. Then you'll want to know what his or her CAREER ASPIRATIONS are with regard to this job and your company. Finally, you want to know about his or her work HABITS and attitudes toward this job and toward his or her future.
• Start the interview by putting the candidate at ease and helping him or her to relax. Tell the candidate that this is just an "exploratory interview" and that your mutual goal is to see if what you are offering and what the candidate is looking for are the same thing.
• Here is another rule: "Don't start selling until you have decided to buy." In other words, resist the temptation to begin the interview by telling the candidate what a great job is being offered and what a great company you have before you have concluded that this is the kind of person you want to hire in the first place.
• The key to good interviewing is for you to ask good questions and then listen carefully and patiently to the answers. Use open ended questions that begin with the words who, how, why, when, where and what to elicit as much information as possible.
• Remember that the person who asks questions has control of the interview. Be sure that is you. The more a person talks, the better feeling you will get about whether or not he or she is a good candidate for the job. You don't learn anything when you are talking about yourself, the company, or the job.

SWAN FORMULA by John Swan says that the four ingredients you are looking for are: Smart, Work Hard, Ambitious, and Nice

• SMART: IQ alone will account for fully 72% of a person's ability to do the job. Perhaps the simplest way for you to assess intelligence is to listen to the number and type of questions that he/she asks. Intelligent people are usually curious and continually ask you about yourself and the company.
• WORK HARD: You don't want a person who is intelligen, ambitious, nice and lazy. A good question to ask is, "How would you feel about working evenings or weekends if there was an important job that had to be done on a tight schedule?"
• AMBITIOUS: A good question to ask to check for ambition is, "Where would you ideally like to be in your career in three to five years?"
• NICE: An optomistic person is generally warm and friendly throughout the interview. A pleasant personality is perhaps as important as any other quality you can find in a good job candidate.

OTHER QUALITIES TO LOOK FOR

• Look for achievement. The only real predictor of future performance is past performance.
• Listen for intelligent questions. Ask, "What questions do you have about the company or the job?" A good candidate will probably have a list of questions written out.
• Look for a sense of urgency. A good question you can ask to test for a sense of urgency is, "If we were to offer you this job, how soon would you be prepared to start?" The right candidate will want to start as soon as possible.

Remember, fast personnel decisions are almost invariably wrong personnel decisions. Proceed slowly. Be patient.

Cast a Wide Net

I'm reading a book called Hire and Keep the Best People by Brian Tracy. Here's a few things that stood out to me from chapter four:

• Recruiting and hiring is an ongoing responsibility of management. Every day managers must be looking for new people.
• A lack of talented people is the only real constraint on your ability to get more and better results.
• The first place to look is within your own company. Conduct an internal search before you consider going outside. Other sources of job candidates are as follows: your personal contacts, executive recruiters and placement agencies, newspaper ads (Sunday employment section is best), the Internet, local community colleges (ask to speak to the placement officer).
• Circulate the written job description throughout your company and tell everyone that you are looking for someone who fits this description. You could even offer your staff a cash bonus reward for finding someone. This will actually SAVE you money because you won't have spend larger amounts of money on advertising and placement fees.
• Recruiting should not be left till the last minute. It is an activity that you should get started on immediately, preferably well in advance of when a particular person or skill will be required.

Hiring: Write Out the Job Description

I'm re-reading a book by Brian Tracy called Hire and Keep the Best People. Here's a couple highlights from chapter three:

Write Out the Job Description

• Something amazing happens between your head and your hand when you write a list of all the qualities that the ideal job candidate would have.
• Practice idealization for the purpose of this exercise. Imagine that you could write a description of the perfect person and hand it over to a special service, and the service would deliver that person to you, exactly to your specifications.
• Write the job description by making a list of every task the individual will be doing from the time he or she starts in the morning until the time he or she finishes in the evening. What will the candidate be expected to do?
• List every function and responsibility that the individual will have to fulfill to do the job properly.
• Once you have a description of the ideal candidate and a clear description of everything that the candidate will be expected to do, set priorities on both lists. Decide what is more important and what is less important to success in the position. Use a simple scoring method of one (low priority) to ten (high priority) for each item.
• The clearer you are about your priorities for the job and the ideal person you are seeking, in advance, the more competently you can interview and the better hiring decision you will make.
• Think about the people with whom the person will be working. This is as important as any other factor. Everyone has to fit into a team of some kind, and it is absolutely essential that whomever you hire gets along well with his or her coworkers and is accepted by them. A mistake in this area alone can be fatal to the selection process.
• A positive, optimistic, and open-minded attitude is best. As a rule, you should refuse to hire negative or unhappy people, no matter how good they might be technically. They almost always become the cause and source of most of your problems in the workplace.

Hiring: Think Through the Job

I'm re-reading a book by Brian Tracy called Hire and Keep the Best People. Here's a couple highlights from chapter two:

Think Through the Job

• Before you begin your search for new employees, take sufficient time to think through the job carefully.
• Think through the exact output responsibilities of the job. Think in terms of measurable results that are clear and objective.
• Any job description has three parts: 1) There are the results expected of that position. You must be absolutely clear about these. 2) There are the skills necessary to achieve those results. What are they? 3) There are the personality characteristics of the ideal person for the job (i.e. someone who is honest, positive, hardworking, energetic, focused, and open minded) and how well he or she will fit in with the rest of the team.
• Hire people for what they have already done successfully rather than for what they think they can do if given a chance on your payroll.

Hiring: Make Selection Your Top Priority

I'm re-reading a book by Brian Tracy called Hire and Keep the Best People. Here's a couple highlights from chapter one:

Make Selection Your Top Priority

• Nothing is more important to your future than your ability to select the right people to work with you to make that future a reality.
• Fully 95 percent of the success of any enterprise is determined by the people chosen to work in that enterprise in the first place. If you get this right, everything else will usually work out all right as well. If you select the wrong people, nothing else will work.
• Hire slowly and fire fast. Take your time to make the right decision prior to hiring in the first place.
• Hiring is an art. It cannot be rushed. You must take your time if you really want to hire well. Fast hiring decisions usually turn out to be wrong hiring decisions. The basic principle of going slow whenever you can is solid and irrefutable. It will greatly increase your overall success rate in hiring.
• The very best companies and the best managers have the best selection processes.
• Sometimes the best hiring decision you ever make is the one you decide not to make in the first place.