8 steps to hire the right people for your Business
One of the the most important ingredients to the success of a business is its people - their character, intelligence, work ethic, commitment, communication skills, purpose. So hiring, retaining and developing good people who do a great job and contribute to the success of the business, is one of the most important activities in a business.
A business could provide a fantastic product or service to its clients and customers; but without a team of competent, intelligent, caring and hard-working people, such a business will struggle.
The right people are the greatest asset, resource and wealth of any business.
And you want only right people in your business - no lazy, incompetent, detrimental, negative, counter-productive or unproductive people.
I’ve started and managed several businesses in my career, employing 3,000 people over that time. We evolved a super-successful system for hiring over the years. These steps are simple, but they do take more time than you might like. I think the excellent results are worth the extra time and effort.
Step 1 - List out Ideal Qualities
Work out the exact and complete set of qualities you want in a person for each job. Get the ideal person firmly in mind. But emphasize inner qualities and traits, even more than specific job experience and job skills (high-quality people will learn specific skills quickly). I consider inner qualities more important than experience. We had great success hiring people with little or no experience but who had excellent innate qualities.
Create in your mind the totally ideal person with all the qualities you would like. Don’t hold back on this just because you think you’ll never find such a person.
Step 2 - Create A Winning Recruitment Ad
Write your ad based on (1) the ideal from Step 1 and (2) the positive aspects of your company. Write a recruiting ad much like you would write an appealing, interesting marketing ad, so that high-quality people will be attracted to apply.
A recruitment ad should double as a marketing ad.
Make your company and job sound appealing, challenging, professionally rewarding and terrific.
Then run this ad on any effective recruiting channels.
And, talk to people you know and trust to find out who they might know who fit your ideal. High-quality people know other high-quality people, so talk to all the high-quality people you know and ask who they know who might fit your business.
Step 3 - Resumes
Now comes the hardest and worst part of this process - going through all the resumes you’ll get.
This step is the worst part because you might get a lot of resumes to go through.
This step is the most difficult part because a resume is NOT an accurate picture of the person.
Most people don’t write good resumes. More often than not, the resume either (1) paints a much better and exaggerated picture than the person truly is, or (2) the resume doesn’t reflect how good someone really is, when the person actually might be a diamond in the rough. So what to do?
I would rather err on the side of contacting and interviewing more people rather than less, because I don't want to lose a potentially great person. I don't judge resumes too strictly or harshly. I would rather spend more time interviewing, than trying to save time by weeding out people based strictly on their resume.
My way takes far more time for sure, and you will certainly interview more duds this way. But you will also find hidden gold and diamonds if you aren’t too strict with resumes. Remember, most often, a resume does not give you an accurate sense of the individual.
Step 4 - Initial Contact
Initial phone calls or video calls to applicants are best. If you have a lot of resumes, have one or more trusted team members help with the initial calls to screen out the obvious unqualified people. Phone and video calls are better than emails because you get a far better sense of the person. Phone calls give you a decent sense of the person, and you then decide on a face-to-face interview based on the phone conversation.
I can hear your objections now. “This takes way too long! We have so many resumes, calling all of them will take forever!”
That’s why I suggest spreading out these resumes among as many trusted people as possible. I can assure you, that my process will give you gold and diamonds that you would lose if you screen resumes too heavily.
You can also invite applicants to interviews via email. This doesn’t give you as accurate a sense of people, but it can be done. Interviews would be decided on the basis of an email exchange.
Step 5 - Initial Face-to-Face Interview
I don’t make hiring decisions based on one interview, so I don't judge applicants too hard initially. It’s easier for applicants to pass our initial interviews - do we like the person as a person or not?
Again, I’m looking for potential jewels, potential superstars. Sometimes, excellent people are nervous or shy the first time they meet you. Some people don’t interview well the first time they meet a prospective employer.
You will lose some great people if you judge too harshly on the initial interview. So I tend to be more lenient in the initial interviews.
My goal in the initial interview is to get a sense of the person, not his or her specific work experience. I look for qualities and attitudes during the initial interview:
a sense of their personality,
their general attitude,
their character,
their intelligence,
their likability factor.
To me, these are far more important than experience.
We have a real conversation. I ask questions and engage the person the same way I would talk with someone I’ve just met at a social function.
I don’t ask the usual corporate questions such as “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” (UGH!) I want a real conversation, I want the person to talk to me about their lives, interests, goals - and their mistakes and failures. This is done with a genuine conversation, not a stiff and robotic Q&A using programmed questions.
If the applicant passes the initial interview, they move on to Step 6.
Step 6 - Working interview
In my mind, working interviews are a MUST. There is no better way to get a good sense of the actual value of a person than by having that person work with your team, and observe how they interact and work.
Working interviews can be one day or more than one day. Have the candidate work with trusted people in your company, including you if possible.
Some companies do not do working interviews because they think those are not allowed in their states, or because they are afraid of some sort of legal problems from working interviews.
Working interviews are legal in every state in the US; each state has their own rules regarding working interviews, so just get familiar with those rules and follow them.
We conducted working interviews for over 25 years, in multiple states, and never had even the slightest hint of trouble. So, don’t let any attorney or HR people convince you that you cannot do working interviews. Find out the state rules. This isn’t difficult.
The enormous advantages of conducting actual working interviews over a day or several days are well worth the time and effort.
We paid people for their working interviews. We paid a set amount that was lower than the actual job rate of pay. The relatively small amounts of money we paid for working interviews were well worth it for the excellent results we achieved.
You can decide if you want to pay for working interview time or not, unless of course your state requires it.
Step 7 - Include Your Best People
Have as many trusted people as possible have a hand in the interview and hiring process for each candidate. Your best people are also your best opinions about who to hire or not.
The success rate of hiring after working interviews is far higher than without a working interview.
And the success rate is also far higher when several trusted people in the group have a hand in interviewing and choosing candidates.
Step 8 - Optional
Every so often, no one candidate appears to be what we’re looking for.
Once again, we learned the hard way. We learned from experience NOT to simply hire the “best of the bunch.”
If no one candidate passed all the steps and was clearly qualified as the right person for us, we simply started the entire hiring process all over again until we found our man or woman. This can be frustrating when it happens, but I learned not to give in to the urge to hire whoever was the best of all the candidates.
You don’t want the best of all the candidates. You want the right person for your business.
Experience vs Qualities
Most businesses hire people based on experience, or very specific job skills.
We have had great success hiring based primarily on inner qualities, and less on specific work experience. Any business will benefit by hiring people with the right qualities, regardless of experience - or lack of experience.
There is one caveat to this hiring philosophy, however. This philosophy works best if the business has excellent, effective training programs in place. We had such training, and so the inexperienced people we hired grew and developed their full potentials. Even the experienced people grew significantly from our training.
Is it better to look for and hire people with excellent and positive qualities, or people with exact, specific job skills and experience? The very best companies consider character and inner qualities more important on specific experience. And in my own experience, I hired far more on qualities than experience. Over 40% of the people hired in my companies had ZERO experience in our field. But we had excellent training programs, and developed superstars.
Here is a list of positive qualities we look for in a candidate:
good intelligence creative
friendliness healthy imagination
high integrity ability to learn quickly
energetic gets along well with others
willingness to contribute willingness to learn
cooperative diligent
positive intentions desire to help others
calm under pressure conscientious
Of course, the absolute ideal is to find someone with everything - all the job skills needed for the position, lots of good experience, and all the positive qualities.
But suppose you don’t have this choice? In reality, these ideal people are a small percentage of the population, so it might be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Suppose you have to choose between an untrained, inexperienced person with lots of great positive qualities, or someone with experience and skills in the job you’re hiring for but with less positive qualities?
In my businesses, I chose positive qualities over experience the vast majority of the time. In fact, many of the people we hired had no experience in our field or even any work experience at all. I looked for hidden diamonds who had the positive qualities listed above. We were very successful in finding these raw gems and developing them into superstars.
Our teams were superb, hard-working, smart, tough, cared greatly about the success of the business, dedicated, highly skilled and terrific assets. I believe one of the main reasons for this success was in giving far less weight to experience than qualities and character.
What are the advantages of hiring by qualities over experience?
People with positive qualities such as those listed above are very easy to train. Such people learn new skills and abilities quickly. But they also bring priceless qualities into your business that cannot be trained into people.
Such people become superstars in your business.
Such people make a manager’s life easy, because they don’t need any hand-holding, baby-sitting, micro-managing, constant monitoring or disciplinary actions.
Such people make far fewer mistakes, and rarely the same mistake twice.
When mistakes are made by such people, they are the kind of mistakes that are usually easy to correct.
Such people care about the business, they care about their teammates, they care about clients and customers, and they care that the business is successful.
Because they truly care, such people take great care of customers/clients/patients. This in turn causes clients to stay with the business, and refer other people to the business.
When a group consists of such people, morale is high, everyone gets along very well, everyone enjoys his or her job, stress is low, conflict is virtually non-existent, and the work environment is pleasant.
In such a group, creativity is high, good ideas are free-flowing, and the business excels.
People with a lot of experience are not always able to fit in with a new company. Very often, someone with a lot of experience or specific job skills aren’t flexible enough to learn new systems and methods they need to know when coming aboard a new company - “We didn’t do it that way in my last company.” Inexperienced people with lots of good qualities don’t carry this baggage. They are a clean slate and you can train them the way you want.
What are the disadvantages of hiring inexperienced people with lots of positive qualities?
The business needs to have an effective training program in place for such people.
There will be a 2-3 month period where an inexperienced person will create a few confusions and inefficiencies while they are learning the ropes and their jobs. (But this is a relatively short time period.)
I’m just a simple-minded engineer, but it appears that the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
And we have proven this in our own businesses over the years. We had excellent on-boarding processes and terrific training. Within 2-3 months, these people were doing a good job; within 6 months to a year, they were excellent. Within 1-2 years they were superstars for us.
There are certain jobs or professions that require people with specific licenses or certifications. These include
Doctors Attorneys Architects Nurses Dental Hygienists
CPAs Securities Traders Physical Therapists Insurance Agents
So your pool of available people is smaller than for non-licensed positions. But even in these cases, the position presented in this chapter still applies. You want to find those people who have the most positive inner and native qualities.
For example, if you want to hire an architect, I would take one with little or no experience out of school with all the positive qualities listed above, than one with 20 years experience who had fewer positive qualities.
As stated above, if you find a licensed professional who has everything - an excellent track record, lots of good experience, and all the positive qualities - then you are very fortunate and of course you hire that person immediately. This is the absolute ideal person.
This applies to certain other jobs that require some level of skill, such as software development or computer programming. Again, you want to hire such people who have the most positive qualities. They will contribute much more in the long run.
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One final note. This hiring process gave us a 95+% success rate. For the other 5% of people we hired who turned out not to be the right person after all, we would know this within the first week or two. Most businesses have a 90-day probationary period for new hires. But in reality, it doesn’t take 90 days to know if you hired the wrong person. You can tell within the first week or two - and for certain within the first month - if the person you hired just isn’t the one you thought he or she was. As soon as you know the person you hired isn’t right for your business, let him or her go immediately, rather than wait out the entire probationary period. You will save yourself, your business and your staff a lot of stress and heartache if you simply let incompatible people go right away.
Many owners and managers won’t like to do what is recommended in this article. But I can assure you that the benefits far, far outweigh all the extra time and effort that go with this process. Having the right and ideal people for your business makes the business more successful, and makes your life much easier. So this process is worth the time it takes. Our businesses were extremely successful in large part because we followed the actions and principles given here, and hired and retained only the people who were right for our businesses.