Hiring Without the Guesswork

As mass production has given way to customized products and services, and technology has shouldered a greater portion of the work, business's needs have changed radically. A pair of hands is by no means enough. Managers rely more heavily on workers' insights and initiatives. A successful service business depends as much on the attitudes of its employees as on their technical skills.

In this context, evaluating job applicants on the basis of their education and previous work experience is myopic -- like looking at a candidate through a peephole when you could open the door for a full view. Some business owners go so far as to say you should be wary of these old standbys. "Looking at résumés and experience is a trap," claims Bruce Male, president of TravCorps, a temporary-nurse service in Malden, Mass.

The pickiest companies we found aim to do what might be called holistic hiring. They believe that a person's behavior, interests, and personality are crucial contributors to his or her success or failure in a job. So they have found a way to decipher this soft data, to decode the click. Some use personality tests -- though they avoid calling them that. Some use activity tests of their own design. Some don't use tests at all. But all strive to objectify the subjective.

There are other components to successful hiring -- hundreds of them, in fact. But to do it well, you can't pluck a few scattered techniques. What's needed is a comprehensive system that starts, above all, with the premise that hiring is an ongoing process, a constant investment of your company's time and energy whether or not you have a job to fill. The rewards are handsome -- in most cases far greater than you might expect.

The penalty for not elevating hiring to number one on your company's priority list? You systematically shortchange your company's potential, as Jim Fuchs, president of Fuchs Copy Systems Inc., in Milwaukee, knows all too well. "We were reactive. All of a sudden we would lose an employee. We'd jump right into action and say, 'We've got to hire quick.' Six candidates come in and we hire one. Chances are, they're not a good fit, but we hire the best of the worst -- we hire out of desperation."

Here's a better way.

Step One: Recruit All the Time

Constant recruiting is what makes the difference between hiring the best of the worst and hiring the best for the job. Very simply, it is forward-looking, ensuring that the pipeline of high-quality candidates is full when you have an opening. Does that mean advertising continuously? Definitely not, according to Tom Garrison, the Dallas food broker. "People who read ads are looking for a job. We are looking for people who aren't looking for a job -- they're happy and productive where they are. When we find that person, we try to sell him on why he should work here," he says.

Garrison and his retail managers call their technique "center of influence" recruiting. When Garrison runs across someone -- such as the aforementioned jewelry clerk -- that he thinks he'd love to have as an employee, or conversely, that he himself would like to work for, he engages her in a conversation about his industry. "If she's excited, if we see she's reading us, then we move into why Brown, Moore and Flint is a good place to work."

Then Garrison begins describing the characteristics he looks for in a job candidate and asks his newly minted center of influence to be on the lookout for anyone fitting the description. Now that 10 or so Brown, Moore and Flint managers have been seeding the area with centers of influence for six years, Garrison gets four or five calls a week regarding potential candidates. Good scouts may come from anywhere; some of the food broker's best recruiters are its clients. Sometimes the recruiters are so sold on the company that they decide to apply for jobs themselves.

Not only did Garrison build a pipeline to future employees, he was careful about its placement. As a result he taps a labor pool that isn't traditional for his industry. Adina Marcheschi did the same thing even before her pipeline was in place. Her recruiting problem: people were turned off by the two most visible characteristics of her company -- it's in the head-hunting business, and it pays commissions only. "A lot of times when people called in response to our ad, they'd say they weren't interested as soon as I mentioned the word commission," she recounts.

Yet she knew that visitors often fell in love with the company's young, open environment. So two years ago, when her fast-growing firm, CPS Employment Services Network Inc., in Westchester, Ill., had a handful of openings, she decided to hold an open house; it attracted people who might not have responded to a conventional ad. Sixty prospects were led through a casual but carefully structured introduction to the company. Each attendee watched a video, was screened by a manager, and filled out an abbreviated application form.

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