I’ve heard it said that if a major corporation makes a bad hire every once in a while, it’s no big deal, but if a smaller company makes a bad hire, it can create chaos, affect the productivity of the whole company, damage the culture and potentially result in lost customers or lost sales.
What do I mean by bad hires, and how do we avoid them? As a business owner, it makes sense that you want to hire the best and brightest talent available, but we often settle for employees that aren’t quite the best and brightest. Or maybe they have stellar credentials, but it turns out they aren’t a good fit with the rest of our team.
The employees with the strongest capabilities and a good cultural fit are superstars — they produce good results and everyone likes them. We want to clone them.
In the opposite corner are those who turn out to be lacking in capabilities and who don’t fit well with the rest of the team. It doesn’t take long to recognize these failures, and it is usually pretty easy to take quick action to eliminate them.
But what about the rest?
The disrupters are those who are very good at what they do, but don’t fit well with the organization. We may hang on to them because they produce results, but they wreak havoc on other employees, customers, suppliers and cause us stress.
The plodders, on the other hand, may not be the most productive members of the team, but everyone really likes them, gosh darn it.
It makes sense that we want to hire superstars and avoid failures, but why is it that so many of us end up with a bunch of disrupters and plodders? The answer may lie in our hiring process.
Let’s start with timing. Most of us put off hiring additional staff until we really, really need them. That’s too late.
We should constantly be on the lookout for superstars and hire them when we come across them. If they are truly superstars, they will more than pay for themselves in a short period of time. If we wait until it is too late, we rush through the hiring process and view “any warm body” as better than “nobody.” We end up with disrupters, plodders, or worse — failures.
Second, do we really know what we are looking for? I know it sounds mundane to write a job description, but we must take the time to clearly define the position so we can better screen the resumés, define the questions to ask in the interviews — you are writing down the questions prior to the interview, aren’t you? — decide who in our organization needs to meet with the applicants and define the criteria to decide between multiple candidates.
Thirdly, we need to set our sights high. I’ve heard many small-business owners lament that they must compete with large corporations for talent and they just can’t match the salary, benefits and career opportunities the larger firms provide.
That may be an issue for some portion of candidates, but in survey after survey we learn that many of these tangibles are less important to high performers than some of the intangibles.
Daniel Pink (you can see him speak at ted.com) argues that the principal motivators for high performance are autonomy, mastery and purpose. In a smaller firm, we can certainly offer much more autonomy, a broader set of responsibilities and a stronger alignment to vision and mission than most employees have in larger organizations. High performers love those benefits, and we should highlight them in our recruiting.
Finally, we tend to hire for knowledge and experience and forget about the importance of cultural fit. It is imperative that the new employee meshes well with the team. You need to meet late-stage candidates multiple times to really get to know them beyond what is on the resumé. Candidates should meet with multiple members of the team just like they would in larger organizations.
I would also encourage “test driving” the prospective employee in various situations, like take them to lunch, meet them for happy hour or some other activity. Knowing how they make decisions, how they treat others, how they conduct themselves and just whether you like hanging out with them — you will be spending a lot of time with them if you hire them — is just as important as knowing their experience and skills.
If you follow these guidelines, I can’t guarantee you will hire only superstars, but maybe you can avoid failures altogether and have fewer disrupters and plodders hanging around.