When you hire a new employee, you want a future team member who will hit the ground running, shows curiosity on how to continuously improve, and is excited to be part of your organization.
Work ethic is something that you can’t teach. You can teach someone the skills necessary to do his job. Motivation and willingness to learn are behaviors that require the individual to step up and manage. You can manage behaviors not attitude.
You want a Team Player. Nothing destroys morale more than hiring the wrong person. I have a friend who has a fast growing manufacturing company, and he grew his staff from just him in his garage, to over 30 people all over the world. In the company’s quest to become larger, he was advised and believed that he needed to hire a corporately trained management team.
The culture of his company changed, because the sales and marketing team that he hired was too focused on titles and areas of authority. s loyal employees that had been with him from the beginning, felt unappreciated after a year and threatened to quit en masse. They told him that the culture they built together no longer existed because the company’s core values had been compromised with these new team members. He was forced to make a choice — either turn his company into a corporation, or keep the same team, cut staff, and let the chips fly. He let the sales team go. Suddenly, his profits and cash flow improved. So it is important to hire the right people for the job and prevent the Us vs. Them attitude.
Hiring the wrong person can destroy your team and hurt morale. Hiring the right person, though, can be the difference between being a $5 million dollar company and a $50 million dollar company. So how do you do it? Using a proprietary search process, based on Topgrading, that can surface multiple candidates, and will create a funnel for those candidates down to the last 1-2.
After the client interviews, we ask them to conduct a real-life role play, using the client’s own data, to see how they handle it. In my experience, this can be a real eye-opener. I had a candidate make it to the final step with the job offer extended and fumble the opportunity because she did not take the role play situation seriously. This person took it for granted that he was the only choice candidate, and by not engaging in the role play exercise demonstrated his lack of interest with being team player for this company..
Using a third party search consultant allows you to observe the process from the sidelines and to focus on running your business. You can rest assured that the process works, is repeatable, measurable, and protects you from bias.
My only question to you at the end of the process is, “Could you see yourself stuck on the airport tarmac during a ground stop with this person sitting next to your for 6 hours?’ That is the true test of tolerance and patience.
Wouldn’t you rather delegate this task to someone with specific expertise in Topgrading. Hiring well is hard. We’ll handle it for you.
AMM Communications | Drive your sales. Communicate better. Hire well. | To hire your next A-Player, contact Ed Mayuga (314) 485-9810 or ed@ammcommunications.com .