Hire Me?Experienced small business owners and managers understand the critical importance of making great hires.  The right people propel your business and the wrong ones cost you precious time and money. The wrong hires ring up expensive opportunity costs by making less than optimal decisions, inappropriately leading or misleading your teams and not helping you create value and gain a competitive advantage.

There’s an entire industry and ample science and psychology behind the various tools and approaches for assessing personalities, gauging intelligence and conducting interviews that systematically uncover the real individual.  That’s all good and important…especially the behavioral interviewing part, however, most small and mid-sized business owners and managers that I know, make key hiring decisions more on gut feeling than on the output of rigorous assessment practices and tools. And while some have finely tuned “hiring guts,” a good number of owners and managers lament the bad calls and the lack of access to help.

I spoke to a number of owners running visibly successful firms and asked for their insights on hiring talent on their teams.  The roll-up of their advice is as follows (I paraphrase):

-Understand the nature of the position and your expectations for the individual in that position today and five years from now. Hire people that have the intelligence, acumen and drive to both grow the role and grow with the role.

-A caveat to the first point: don’t be cheap now or you’ll pay for it later.  Invest in the right talent today, even if it means paying more than you had hoped for.  The right person will pay dividends almost immediately and long into the future.

And importantly, hire for the 3 C’s and 1 D: Character, Critical Thinking Skills, Communication Capabilities and Decision Making Acumen.

-Character: look for evidence through behavioral interviewing and reference checking of core values, handling of ethical dilemmas and commitment to the development and support of others.  It’s not hard to discern someone that’s in it for themselves and “win at any costs” versus someone with a more externally oriented focus.  One business owner likes to evaluate people by how they compete as part of athletic teams.  He’s been known to invite a potential male hires to his weekly basketball game at the Y.

-Critical Thinking Skills: truth be told, the phrase is mine and not one used directly by the business owners that I spoke with, but the meaning is the same.  People are looking for individuals that see big pictures or that recognize patterns from the noise in the environment.  They make sense out of chaos and are capable of forming plans to exploit the chaos to their firm’s advantage. These are the people that dream up new products, come up with new ways of marketing and selling or see opportunities for gaining efficiencies through improved processes. It sounds lofty, but it can be as simple as the example below.

One manager describes looking for any signs that the individual attacks problems with non-traditional solutions. “I would rather hear a potential sales rep tell me how she landed the deal by investing a business day observing the customer’s team and then tailoring the proposed solution based on what she learned, versus a rep that plays only by the price book.  The latter are a dime a dozen.”

-Communication Capabilities: One comment: “I hire people that build credibility every time they open their mouths. I want to be impressed by what they ask and how they answer.  It shows me how they think, it provides insight into their character and it tells me whether they have the gray matter that I need to grow my business.”

Another indicated, “I hire great communicators and it starts with how well they listen. If someone proves to me that they are a good listener and that they understand that when someone else is talking, their only job is to understand the real intent of the person talking,” I want to hire that person.

Still another offered that she looks carefully beyond the resume and how an individual expresses himself/herself in writing. “I want to understand the complete communicator, and too often, we forget to look at how an individual presents himself in writing.  This is an important indicator of intelligence for me.”

-Decision Making Acumen: Again, my phrase, but consistent agreement.  One individual summed it up best: “I look for the individual’s examples of tough decisions.  What were the stakes? How did she assess risk?  How did she gather her data?  Who’s opinion did she seek?  How fast did she act?”

Another commented: “It’s important for me to understand how people deal with bad decisions. Some are convinced that they can fix anything and will continue to pursue a clearly bad course of action.  Others understand that accepting a bad decision and learning from it is the right next step.  If I can find good examples of how someone handled genuine mistakes, I gain great insight into an individual’s approach to business and leadership.”

The Bottom-Line for Now:

You can do much worse than improving your ability to gauge the 3 C’s and a D.  Character, communications capabilities, critical thinking skills and decision making acumen are the raw materials required for individual and organizational success.  Here’s to your hiring health!