by Dave Clough
Large businesses need more people for the company to earn more so they can report those earnings to their shareholders,
VC funded startups need to hit milestones in order to get the next chunk of funding, and
Small businesses need people to keep up with demand in a fast-growing company.
But most businesses struggle with hiring the right people. The typical hiring process rarely delivers consistent results of acquiring A-players.
It’s easy for a candidate to “game the system” to present himself as someone he is not.
The resume and cover letters may not have been created by the candidate, or may have been “massaged” by a friend, family member, or career coach with more experience in crafting these documents. They often stretch the truth, to put it mildly.
The interview is just a performance – a well-coached interaction when the candidate is on her best behavior (and/or medication), which may not be consistent if hired.
The typical reference checking calls are useless because the reference is not objective and knows not to say anything negative. Or you might just be directed to HR.
If a candidate spends just a few minutes searching Google for interview strategies, here are some typical articles she’d find:
Interviewing Tips: How To Maximize Your Effectiveness
Substitution: An Interview Performance Technique Borrowed From Acting
The Science of Nailing the Interview
How to Answer The 25 Most Important Interview Questions
How To Take Control Of The Interview
What NOT to Say in an Interview
5 Ways to Sell Yourself While Answering “Do You Have Any Other Questions?”
The Perfect Resume: Quantify & Qualify
And that’s all from just one free site.
With all this guidance of what to say and what not to say, how do you get to know the real person? One article talks specifically about acting! Given that many interviewers have made up their mind within 90 seconds, all a candidate has to do is manage or “take control of” the first few minutes, and he’s in.
The hiring manager must change the game to get additional insight into the candidate.
The good news is that we have developed a process that delivers a 90%+ chance of hiring success.
A significant key to hiring success is the Assessment portion of the process. I’ve personally hired more than 75 people and have assessed and/or helped select maybe a thousand more. This process is the culmination of what worked, lessons learned from what didn’t work, and information from other hiring resources with proven results.
Defining “Mis-fits”
So far I’ve referred to good hires and bad hires, but let’s be clear. A bad hire is not necessarily a bad person. You should give yourself and your team more credit than to say you hired a bad person. That person was just not right for your company or the position. The person may be fine in another culture and job.
Benchmark
(a profile of the right person)
Mis-fitTM
Perfect Hire
Going forward, I’m going to refer to a bad hire as a Mis-fitTM. This bad hire was a bad fit, a mistake, hence a Mis-fitTM.
On the opposite end of the hiring scale is a great hire, and we should make that clear as well.
You Want A-players
Perhaps you’ve heard the saying, “A-players attract other A-players. B-players attract C-players.” What does that mean? First, my definitions:
A-players are driven to succeed. They are typically goal oriented. They consistently get the job done on time without a manager looking over their shoulder. They may have some setbacks, but they learn from them.
A-players challenge each other. There may be informal, friendly competitions, and while that can cause minor problems, wanting to better a coworker raises one’s competency.
A-players seek continuous improvement, and they put in the work knowing that the payoff will be in the long term. That payoff is personal for them; it might be monetary, experience for a desired position, or freedom from oversight to name a few common goals.
A-players are typically smart, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to their GPAs from college. Book smart doesn’t always ensure that the person will be job smart (some use the term street smart, but I won’t, as not to confuse with those who can survive on their own in a city).
I have worked with many high IQ people who have not performed at the level of others with lower GPAs from schools of a lower tier. Job smart is what an employer should be looking for, so it can be a big gamble to hire a high GPA college student who does not have significant work experience, demanding a high price.
B-players are not quite as results-driven as A-players. They see what the A-players can accomplish, but they don’t have the aptitude (talent, ability), are not willing to do the work or won’t put in the time that is required to get those results.
It is not the case that B-players are not as smart as A-players. Some B-players are smarter than some A-players; they just don’t work as effectively. Things may have come easy for them in the past, they may just have passive personalities, or they are not motivated to change their station in life. They may have relied on their intelligence, not hard work, to be at the top and didn’t have to fight for the top spots.
I call this “a big fish in a small pond.” If a smart person hasn’t needed to fight to succeed, what would drive them to get even better? A bigger pond would be one with more talented fish. This may be a higher ranked school, or a company that is known for hiring A-players. That formerly top performer becomes a B-Player in the bigger pond.
C-players do not stand out. They don’t do great work, and they don’t do bad work. If the company is large enough, there are positions that could be OK for C-players. These could be called Minions. They cost less and can get the job done, as long as the expectations are not too high, and passion for the job is not necessary.
I would caution that C-players (and worse, D-Players if you have any) will have a negative effect on your business, unless there is a physical or effective virtual wall between the top performers.
Passion and motivation are the energy that drives a business. People who are just there for a job will sap energy from others.
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Low performers underserve key customers, attract other low performers, undermine customer loyalty, erode employee morale and trust, fail to proactively find great opportunities, fail to execute, waste money, and repel high performing employees.
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Part of my story may help illustrate this. I grew up in a poor blue collar town in the middle of New Hampshire. New Hampshire has a lot to offer (no income or sales taxes, beautiful surroundings, lakes, ocean, mountains, Presidential candidate visits, etc.) but the education system is not one of its strengths. I attended the most advanced courses in my high school, and I was near the top of my class.
I applied and was accepted into the Electrical Engineering program at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, the flagship of the NH state college system. I felt pretty good about myself. I seemed to fit in on a personal level with many of my freshman classmates not only from New Hampshire, but from other states, primarily Massachusetts.
My wakeup call occurred after the first round of tests in Calculus and Physics. I found that the education others received in high school was far superior to my own. Many told me that the content on the tests for them was all review, yet I was seeing much of the material for the first time. Needless to say, I was no longer at the top of the class.
I had two other friends from my high school who were in the mechanical engineering program who experienced the same. One dropped out freshman year, and the other transferred out sophomore year to an easier school. But I did not. I stayed and clawed my way out of the hole I was in.
I came from a small pond, and this was a much bigger pond – with 16 thousand students, maybe it was more of a lake. I found that there were much high
er IQ fish, and even they were challenged by the engineering curriculum. It was hard to fathom at the time that there were even bigger lakes of more talented fish, namely private colleges with bigger, well-known names and tougher entry criteria in the New England area.
Electrical Engineering is a difficult major, and pure theory was never my strength. I found that I excelled in applying knowledge to real world situations. I had a few internships that helped me understand that. I was fortunate that one of my interviewers at a college employment fair recognized that my value was more than my GPA, and ended up recommending me to my future employer.
Although many had higher GPAs, few had my hands on experience. I was hired into a big pond (Raytheon Company), and soon stood out among the many that were hired at the same time. I worked alongside others from “better” schools, but I think the reason I excelled was because I worked harder to become job smart.
While it was a big pond, after less than 5 years, I felt that I did not fit the culture. I found that there were too many C-players for me, and I wanted to challenge myself further. I won’t get into details here, but I found that the engineering technicians who were in a union did not push themselves to the level that I thought was needed to deliver a successful project. (One example: one person told me to slow down because I was making others look bad.)
While I had made many friends there (I was president of the golf league – a great way to bond with the lab manager), I felt I needed more. I had to make a decision: stay and relax my standards, or try to find a place that was the right fit for me. I reached for an opportunity at a company with tough hiring standards.
The company’s hiring process was nicknamed the “walk of fire” because the interview process was so challenging. They had some of their smartest people on the interview team. Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS) hired me more for my EQ (Emotional Quotient, or Emotional Intelligence) than IQ, and more for my tenacity, temperament, work smarts, and experience than for my GPA and Alma Mater.
At Synopsys, I worked with some of the smartest and most talented people I have ever met in my life, yet I was still able to excel and lead a team that was smarter on a measured scale (IQ, GPA, etc.) than I was. The company culture was one of continual improvement, and I thrived in that environment.
The moral of the story is that A-players don’t come from a cookie cutter. It is their results that matter. Some people are born smart, and some are a product of a challenging environment. Some people challenge themselves, and others respond well in an organization with high expectations. A-players don’t play it safe. A-players rise to the challenge.
Look at a candidate’s past to see where she was challenged and how she responded. Look at the resume for continuous improvement, and verify the information through the interview process. Interviewers need to ask about personal results (not team results).
Don’t settle for B-players or C-players. Your organization’s A-players need peers. A-players can spot other A-players, and they tend to respect and associate with one another. A-players attract other A-players, and B-players attract and prefer to hire C-players because it makes the B-player feel like an A-player. That is why you want your A-players on your interview team.
Another thing to consider is that B and C-players tend to become subservient to or report to the A-players.
We can compare A-players to wolves. As a pack, they are a force that can triumph over even larger animals (in other words, a big challenge). But what of a lone wolf? Wolves prefer to live in packs, and achieve together. A lone wolf will try to find a pack because they don’t do as well on their own. If there isn’t a pack of A-players at your company, the A-players you do have will leave to find a pack at another company.
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Don’t settle for B-players or C-players.
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This book will give you a process that works, is scalable, and promises that you can hire a great team. It still takes work – you have to put in the effort. Taking the easy way out or cutting corners is rarely successful.
Chapter 2: Determine Openings
Before you decide to hire another person, ask yourself these questions:
Do you really need to hire for this position? Is there a long-term need for the position?
Is someone in the wrong place in the company who can fit this need? Is the needed skill set available?
Can you restructure/shuffle current employees to cover the tasks of this position?
Can it be done by a part time person? Is part-time the right answer?
Can it be done more economically by a contractor? (Usually this is not a core function of the company, e.g. bookkeeping or marketing.)
What will be the return on the investment? (i.e. Will you bring in more than you pay out?)
How do you know when it is time to hire a person? You are probably worried about taking on more expense, but you also don’t want to lose revenue by not having the right people. So how do you determine it is time to hire? Here are some signs that it is the right time:
Everyone is swamped
It is probably time to hire someone when everyone has too much to do. I’m not talking about things that they could do if they had time. I’m talking about not having enough time to complete the things they need to complete by a due date without working excessive hours.
While working a lot of hours is OK in the short term, working too many hours has many negatives over the long term. At a minimum, it can lead to high stress and poor decision making. Working long hours for an extended period can cause burnout and employee dissatisfaction that can lead to a decline in customer care and unwanted employee attrition. Typically your A-players leave first because they are in demand by other companies. It is those who can’t find something easily that are left when the best leave.
Typically a manager will hear complaints if people are overworked. Investigate this further before deciding, because some employees just like to complain. If there is legitimately more work that they can handle, you may not need to hire someone new – just manage your current employees differently. (That last sentence is obviously from a business advisor and not a recruiter.)
You are leaving money on the table
If there are high margin jobs that you are turning down, it is time to hire. Before you do, consider cutting out the low margin jobs. As you grow, fire the bottom 5-10% of your clients as measured by margin. (This is not just those who want to pay less, but also those who require lots of resources and support.) If your margins are good, hire people who can bring in the revenue that would have gone to another company.
I worked with a company that had growing pains, and much of it was due to the CEO not being able to let go and delegate to competent people. This is a legitimate issue: sometimes it is hard to transfer enough knowledge to others to make them proficient quickly enough. With that said, it is an issue that can be solved with good management.
Many times if the CEO says, “I want to stay small,” or “our culture will change,” or “our customer care will suffer,” this is fear of growing too fast for the management to catch up. Many times, a seasoned advisor or manager is needed.
More revenue can solve a lot of problems, and sometimes a company needs to achieve “critical mass” to be sustainable. An example of this is a low margin provider that can only prosper with a little from many.
In technical terms, a critical mass is the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear fission chain reaction - any less and the reaction stops. (Sorry, it is hard to not think like an engineer.) Before a CEO decides to remain a boutique company, talk to a business advisor to mentor and help manage the risk of growth.
You will save money
It may be counterintuitive to think that you can save money by hiring. Another person means more benefits, additional payroll expenses, more office equipment (computer, desk, chair, phone), and the time and expense required to hire and onboard someone new. But overtime for hourly workers can be expensive, and that can appl
y to salaried exempt employees as well. (A new law on this was passed in 2016, but was being suspended by a judge in Texas at the time of this writing.)
Just be careful that the employees understand that hiring another is a good idea. In some cases they may not. One example is the impact of hiring more police in a small town. The police union specifies the working conditions and compensation. Typically police can work 8, 10 or 12 hour shifts with a few days off between. I know many police officers work their entrepreneurial businesses on their days off, but they can also fill that time by covering for another officer, off-duty privately paid traffic details, and other event details.
More police officers means more competition for this extra income that could be time and a half or double time if paid by the municipality. Hiring more police officers would save money if the overtime is being paid consistently. I can tell you firsthand that the officers would rather have the overtime pay that can add 30+% to their household income.
