Hiring Without the Guesswork

To get at an entirely different group of prospective employees -- those who did not respond to the open-house invitation -- Marcheschi asked attendees to refer her to other people who might be interested in her company. All told, an ad and the open house yielded more than 100 applicants, 5 of whom were hired. "When you need to hire a lot of people quickly, it's your best way to do it," she asserts.

Step Two: Write a Real Job Description

We think this little piece of homework is the single best thing you can do to hire well. That's right, write a good job description. It may sound like a bureaucratic nuisance you don't want anything to do with, but that's not the kind of job description we mean. We're talking about reaching an understanding of a position that goes far beyond a list of duties.

The reason that is so critical? If you have real intimacy with what's required in a particular job, you are disciplined to look for someone who matches the description. Without a blueprint, managers will usually hire the person they like the best who's done the job before. "Most often we make the mistake of hiring in our own image," says TravCorps' Bruce Male.

He recently crafted a job description that dramatically altered the kind of person he hired for a key position -- the manager of TravCorps' growing information-systems department. "Initially, I thought that I needed someone who had technical mastery," recalls Male. Then he defined the job in terms of its objective -- what would be the result of hiring the right person? What he wanted, he realized, was someone who could develop the department and discern what the rest of the company required of it. He needed a nurturer and communicator -- not an inspired computer hacker.

To continue building a profile, define the traits needed to succeed in the job. At Advanced Network Design, a third-party telecommunications handler in La Mirada, Calif., managers begin by writing down a list of actions a person will undertake in the job. Then they itemize the behavior necessary to execute those activities successfully. Finally, they concoct a script for the interview: "You write open-ended questions that will get people to discuss their previous work history in such a way as to disclose whether they have those traits," explains Dave Wiegand, the company's president.

The conventional job description, for example, focuses on activities. Here's the traditional salesperson's job description: generate and close new sales, make 15 cold calls a week, write call reports, and attend weekly sales meetings. Sound familiar? Obviously, there's nothing inaccurate about the description, but it leaves you clueless to find someone who will be a good salesperson. You're stuck, essentially, with just looking for a candidate who has done those five activities before.

In contrast, Wiegand's job description for a salesperson consists of 17 behavioral traits. One of them is healthy "self-talk," the mental dialogue we have with ourselves. To uncover that characteristic, Wiegand might ask the applicants what they would say to a fellow salesperson who was getting a lot of rejections and having difficulty making appointments. "By twisting the situation around and suggesting that they're helping others, you are discovering what they say to themselves," says Wiegand. What he wants to hear is a buck-up-and-keep-going speech to the imaginary colleague; he believes the inclination toward that response, rather than empathetic pessimism, is a key predictor of a salesperson's success.

A first step to constructing a truly useful job description: itemize the patterns of behavior of your most successful employee in each job class. Then revise that list as you get better at hiring. Over time, it will become a valuable recipe. At Millard Manufacturing, a food-processing-equipment manufacturer in Omaha, job profiles are reviewed, discussed, and tinkered with every time a position is filled. One personality trait may be replaced with another. Brown, Moore and Flint's Garrison considers his job profiles such an important template that he keeps the master copies in his desk.

Step Three: Interview According to Plan

After prescreening with minimum requirements and a five-minute interview, the serious interviewing is at hand. When preparing for interviews and while doing them, there are two things to think about. The first is what you probably already concentrate on -- the actual interchange between you and the aspiring employee. The second is your overall interview strategy. That usually neglected part of hiring involves choosing how many interviews you'll give each applicant, how long they'll last, the purpose of each, and who will conduct them.

Look first at how your approach might contrast with those of your competitors. Ari Weinzweig, co-owner of Zingerman's, a delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Mich., attributes his success in hiring to interview standards that are much higher than others in his industry. "To do three interviews is almost unheard of, and for the owner to do one of them is real different," he explains. Turnover at Zingerman's is half what its competitors suffer.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT