Hiring Great Staff

By Blake DuBose and Mike DuBose

Business leaders often say their staff is their most valuable asset, yet many fail to practice smart hiring practices. Employees’ skills and outlooks should align with the company’s mission, purpose, values, and vision. In fact, while researching his bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins determined that hiring competent staff and placing them in the right positions is critical to business success.

We took this philosophy seriously when we set out to build a great family of companies in 2007. In the past, we made every hiring mistake imaginable, but our four companies are now staffed by great teams who work well together. It took a lot of effort to get the right employees on the bus (and the wrong ones off to other ventures), but it was necessary for success.

Our new strategy is to “hire slow and tough” to find the right team members for us; in fact, we have turned down many extraordinarily qualified candidates because they did not fit our unique culture. When hiring mistakes happen (sometimes, no matter how thorough you are, the wrong people slip through the screening process), we “fire fast and with care.”

While money, prestige, and titles can come into play, the best workers simply want jobs they enjoy, good peers, and effective leaders. Your first challenge is to draw outstanding applicants to your company. Here are some suggestions on building the best possible staff:

Define Your Culture: We solicited staff input on a document that explains our values: honesty, teamwork, being ethical, exceeding customer expectations, having fun, getting things done, humility, community involvement, making wise, prompt decisions, good communications, and producing high-quality work. This became a useful tool in describing our culture to potential applicants and also in defining how we behave towards ourselves, the public, vendors, and customers. Our goal was (and is) to create a family of companies where the staff looks forward to coming to work each day.

Write Good Job Descriptions: In The One Thing You Need to Know, Marcus Buckinghamrecommends, “Define clear expectations. Research reveals that less than 50 percent of employees claim that they know what is expected of them at work.” Specific, accurate job descriptions attract good employees, make expectations understandable, and can be used to measure performance.

Offer Incentives: We pay our employees well and provide them with excellent fringe benefits (company-paid insurance, 401k, liberal leave, etc.). This means taking in fewer profits as company owners, but it is worth it because we see our close-knit professional family as our first customer. Excellent salaries and benefits attract great employees and result in lower turnover, and happy employees usually mean delighted customers.

Post Job Descriptions, Culture Statements, and Benefit Packages Online: We combine the three into job announcements on our website, allowing candidates to thoroughly understand our company, expectations, and philosophies before applying.

Formally Advertise Jobs: Newspaper classifieds are expensive and appeal to a limited audience. Thus, we use a combination of internal notices, newspaper advertising, careerbuilder.com, and university career services to draw a wide applicant pool. We develop economical three-line job ads with links to detailed information online. Advertise for at least two weeks to allow for job-seekers who may be on vacation, then respond promptly to any applicants.

Ask candidates for an updated résumé and cover letter. We allow both online and snail mail applications and keep the initial application process short to attract the maximum number of prospective new hires.

Once you have collected the responses, take the following steps:

Screen Résumés: One person should screen submissions to weed out candidates that do not meet minimal requirements. Someone once applied to a graphic artist position at our companies who had no relevant experience—but he felt qualified because he was a “sandwich artist” at a restaurant! Needless to say, he did not make it through the first cut. The applications that do meet initial requirements should then be screened by the hiring supervisor and a staff member who will work directly with the new employee.

Perform Thorough Interviews: Hiring supervisors should call remaining applicants on the phone to assess their skills, personalities, and job interests and decide who will be invited to interview in person. For this last round of interviews, we employ the “Rule of Three:” three face-to-face interviews on three different dates by three different staff members (to promote “buy-in,” preferably those who will work with the new employee). This exposes candidates to staff members of various races, genders, and ages and allows them to hear different viewpoints on the company. We ask out-of-the-box questions to test their ability to think quickly, such as one Blake recently used: “You are one of two final candidates. Tell me why I should hire the other person?” Ask many “what if” questions to probe deep into candidates’ philosophies, and make sure to LISTEN for at least two-thirds of the interview.

Ensure that your interviewers are trained to ask only legal questions. For fairness and consistency (and to reduce the risk of legal issues), use structured interview questionnaires that assign each person points based on job requirements and other items that can be scored logically.

Complete Full Applications: Final candidates complete signed, formal job applications that allow us to verify the truth of the information they provided. We also do background checks and medical, drug, education, criminal, and financial screenings on them. To assess their writing skills and thought processes, we ask them to handwrite a one-page overview of why they want to work with our companies on the day of the final interview.

Conduct Personality, Cognitive, and Work-Style Assessments: Once the search has narrowed to two candidates, applicants complete simple personality profiles. These tests generate insight into candidates’ intelligence, ways of processing information, aggressiveness, creativity, social skills, leadership, and reactions to stress.

Run Background Checks: Insperity, our co-employer, advised us that the greatest problem in human resources today is that many applicants “enhance” their résumés. Extensively check applicants’ backgrounds beyond their references. Recently, an applicant claimed to have a college degree, but investigations by Insperity proved that was untrue. The person had a well-crafted letter, excellent résumé, relevant experience, and three impressive interviews. We were stunned!

Bottom Line: Don’t rush the hiring process! If you don’t find excellent candidates on your first search, throw your net out there again until you do. Select competent people with good attitudes, place them into the right jobs, and everyone benefits; do it wrong and be ready for lots of headaches!