Your Top Problem Isn’t What, It Is “Who”
Many of our clients think they have a super innate gift for hiring, and they don’t. Worse, they don’t have a process for hiring. They treat recruiting and hiring as a necessary evil. But for most of you, you’re at a stage in your business careers now where it’s not about managing tasks anymore. It’s not about managing what to do, it’s managing who. Most of you have reached an inflection point in your companies where it’s all about the people.
Of course, I’m sure none of you got into business because you said, “Hey, I can’t wait to go manage people.” You always say, “Gosh, if I don’t have to manage people, my life would be perfect.” But that’s not reality, is it? You have to have a system for recruiting, hiring, and onboarding your people and you have to devote more and more of your executive time to the care and feeding of those people.
To help you with this, we recommend a book called “Who” by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It has a terrific blueprint for how to hire. It has scripted questions that you shouldn’t even change a comma or a syllable or anything on; you should use this script exclusively. It talks about the importance of getting the right culture, the right fit for the people on your team. It talks about the mistake that people make of getting really good technicians on the team that don’t fit very well with the culture and some of the ramifications thereof. It talks about how to do proper telephone interviews as a screening tool.
It talks about how to ask a simple, open-ended question when you kind of get stuck and your candidate is talking too much. (“Tell me more about …”) It talks about how to actually get references from your candidates that are meaningful, which I think is a terrific thing. Too often, I find references to be useless, because nobody ever gives any legitimate, solid, doable, actionable information, so why waste the time calling the references. But this book has terrific methodology for how to do it right.
Make your people your top priority. In this book, it says that after a certain point in the life of your business, 50% of the CEO’s time ought to be devoted to people. People throughout your business – getting new people, the right people, the culturally fit people, and getting them on your team. I agree a thousand percent that should be the case.
