Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2010. The statement that the best tennis player is 21 reflects 2010 and is approximate even then, as the world number one in August 2010 was 24.
When we decide to hire staff, we look for people who are leaders in their field, yet we don’t act like leaders when it comes to giving the necessary time to something as important as the people who will make up the company. What do you need to know when hiring staff?
1. There’s a basic, elementary principle: never hire a friend’s son. This principle has its exceptions. If you’re very interested in your friend’s son because you’ve heard about his professionalism and you want him in your company because you think he’ll make a very positive contribution, don’t hesitate: hire him.
But be careful when you do it out of obligation, because your friend asked you to. If that person isn’t up to the job, you’ll face a dilemma when it comes to firing him, and a problem once you have, which may well cost you your friendship.
2. Check the résumé. It has been shown that 70% of résumés are padded with small lies. By a small lie we mean, for example, saying the candidate left a company for another that offered a better job, when in reality he was fired for one reason or another.
Discard the junk on the résumé, meaning things like having been class representative at 15 or having held positions of responsibility at non-profits. Pay attention to “intermediate” spoken and written English and to computer courses, because in 80% of cases the candidate doesn’t even reach a basic level. If these are two essential requirements for the position, test the candidate during the interview. It will save you the cost of an early dismissal.
3. Don’t focus so much on degrees and qualifications, because a person is valuable not for what they have but for what they can do with it.
4. Choose people you know. Be careful with this point. I don’t mean friends, but people you know professionally. Imagine your sales dropped because of the good work of one of your competitor’s salespeople. Wouldn’t you rather have that person, even if you have to pay a bit more, than someone you don’t know professionally?
More and more, employees are recruited out in the field, through a process of observation rather than analysis in a one-hour interview.
5. I’ve always heard that you shouldn’t hire someone who criticizes their previous employer. On the one hand, I agree, but on the other, you may have a very capable person with a good quality in front of you: sincerity. Just listen carefully. If what they criticize makes sense and you’re not going to make the mistakes they describe, you may be facing one of these two people:
- A very foolish, ungrateful worker who does nothing but criticize and find fault with everything.
- An honest, sincere and very intelligent worker who, being honest, is asking you for honesty in return. Even knowing that you shouldn’t criticize a former employer in a job interview, they do it because they want you to know, and to know that they aren’t willing to jump through the same hoops again. Watch closely, because if this is the person in front of you, you may have a great leader and a born worker.
6. The age factor. Why do you look for young people for the production line, but a 30-year-old won’t do for a management position? It’s a big mistake for companies to think that an old hand knows more from experience than a young person. By that logic, the best tennis player would be 45, and as it happens he’s 21.
It’s true that someone who has spent 40 years leading teams will have more experience than a 30-year-old who has only led a small group once. But think about the motivation that young person will bring because you’re giving him the chance to start a project. It’s like driving: age gives you experience behind the wheel, but also more bad driving habits, and some of them can no longer be corrected.
Hiring a young leader can give your company a very different perspective. You should take advantage of the new generation in business, because they can bring a lot of new, fresh value to your company.
I’ll give you a very practical example from my own experience. When I was 19, I was a team leader at a company that paid me late and didn’t respect the fact that the people I managed were very capable salespeople. Every so often, middle managers made decisions without consulting me, which broke the calm and harmony I had built in our small sales team.
When I went to ask the owner for an explanation, he told me he couldn’t interfere in the decisions made by the regional director and that I had to respect and accept them. In short, he wasn’t listening to me and wasn’t respecting my team, the company’s top sellers, so I decided to change companies.
I went straight to my direct competitor, number two in sales. The owner didn’t bother to see me in person, since the king shouldn’t waste time on pawns. I spoke to the head of human resources, who told me I could join the company, but as a salesperson, not as a team leader, because I was too young to lead sales teams.
The offer didn’t convince me, so I went to the company ranked third in the sector by sales. I remember the day of the interview as if it were yesterday. I arrived without an appointment and asked for the owner. They asked me what for and told me the owner didn’t personally see salespeople. I told the secretary it was a business matter for the company, that I had no intention of selling him anything, and that it was something I couldn’t discuss with her but that would certainly interest the owner.
The secretary called him, but he was out and couldn’t see me that day. She gave me an appointment for the next morning at 8:30. He would see me personally.
I had never overslept in my life, and that day of all days it happened. I arrived about 30 minutes late for the interview. Even so, he had no problem seeing me. My interview took place without a résumé and consisted solely of these words:
I’m so-and-so, team leader at company X, and these are the problems I have there. I’d like to work with you. You’re the third company in the sector, and I want to make you number one, the sales leader. I know how to do it, and it would give me enormous satisfaction to push my current company down to second place.
I was hired, and not as a team leader but as head of the sales department, at the age of 19. A year later I had achieved my goal and kept my promise: we were the sales leader.
My old company overlooked one small detail: they were the company, but I was the company’s face to the customers, so bringing the customers over was relatively easy. I got the owner of my new company to come with me to visit all my former customers, with the sole aim of showing them that the company I was moving to was more human, humble and down-to-earth, to the point that its owner didn’t care about treating people like a king treats commoners.
That’s why there really are no fixed rules for hiring staff; you need a minimum of intuition when recruiting people.
Remember: you’ll only be the best if you work with the best, and sometimes the best aren’t perfect, but they acknowledge their imperfections and aren’t afraid to show them to you. If you rely on the standard hiring protocol, you may find yourself putting your foot in it when you come across someone who knows the protocol. At that point, you, the recruiter, become the victim.
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