What is the most important part of a company – it's people. You can have the most elegant strategy, most advanced product and the strongest balance sheet but if you don't have the right people in place to execute on thei strategy, to iterate and surmount the inevitable hurdles and curves; a company will ultimately fail to reach its full potential.
It is the people in an organization that determine how competitive a company is and how successful company will ultimately be. It is the people who drive the customer experience, who dial in the commitment to execution. And they determine how efficiently and effectively resources are deployed. Yet effective hiring is the one area in an organization that most resists measurement by metric. How do you know that the people you hire have the fire and the competitive spirit to achieve exceptional performance? How do you know that they have the drive to make the people around them better? That they have the passion and perseverance to push through setbacks and hurdles? With the infinite complexity of human beings, there is no other way to assess these qualities then a rigorous process led by the cultural leaders of an organization.
Individuals will sub-consciously raise or lower their game according to the prevailing denominator on the team. Leaders should take it as their responsibility to ensure that all team members are only surrounded by exceptional peers - people that help them be better. They should openly and explicitly commit that to the team - "my most important job is to ensure that you are surrounded by only the most exceptional people."
A lot of companies rely on their human resource departments to source and evaluate candidates. To check references and confirm experience. Or rely solely on hiring managers who are very often under the gun to hit metrics and meet plan and who are- as a consequence - all too often in a rush to put a "butt in the chair" quickly. At MDeverywhere, I made it clear that there were no more important decisions to be made than hiring decisions. That meant that everyone - senior people especially - had to allocate significant time to the process. The hiring process for all levels of the organization was aggressively rigorous. We took it seriously and spent a tremendous amount of time on getting it right. We made it hard to be hired at MDeverywhere.
Even people applying for level positions, had to go to multiple screening interviews. Including interviews with peers, interviews with individuals from other departments (who often had the highest bar), and senior people in the organization. Everybody committed to finding time on busy calendars for this process. Every candidate also had to give a presentation to a group of peers. Even if the position was not one requiring this sort of work on a day-to-day basis, we used the presentation – which could be on a topic of their choosing - to assess how people communicated, how they behaved under pressure, to measure their ability to cogently organize ideas and how they thought on their feet. It also gave their personality the space to show itself.
Finally, reference checks were not a simple box check. We did a minimum of six professional and personal. The hiring manager was responsible for making these reference calls following a very detailed script. To ensure a consistent process, the managers submitted their notes as part of the hiring file. These were reviewed by the hiring team before a final decision made and an offer given. We dug deep during these reference calls, as a way of not only of assessing whether they would be a good fit for the role and the Company but also to gain insight into how we should best onboard them and work with them to achieve their greatest success. That is why it was critical for the hiring manager to make these calls. There is no better way for a manager to learn how to work with a new person than in having detailed conversations with former colleagues. We didn't just accept the list initially supplied by the candidate - we told them the people with whom we wanted to speak - which supervisor, which peer, which subordinate and asked for their contact info. And we always, always did back-channel checks.
We came to this process through some degree of trial and error. After learning the lessons and costs of bad hiring decisions. And make no mistake, the costs are far higher than lost recruiter fees or out-of-pocket expenses. The cost to an organization - especially a small one - of having even one person without the right skills, the right attitude or the right commitment - is unbelievably high. Mostly in time. It takes months to find the right person and take them through the hiring process, it takes a couple of more months to come to grips with the fact that you made a mistake, some time to "counsel" the person because you don't want to accept that you made a mistake and then at least a month to get them off payroll. Meanwhile the work isn't getting done, the team is distracted and people lose faith in the process.
As my father says, if you don't have the time to do something right the first time, how are you going to find the time to do it over? You'll know if your team is spending enough time on the hiring process when they begin to try and shift activities back the HR team. Don't let it happen.
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