Your #1 Impediment to Growth – Bad Hires!

June 25, 2010

How often have you said to yourself that hiring good people is the most important aspect of running a company? How many times have you complained about recruiting and the shortage of good candidates? And what have you really done to solve that problem? How have you widened the funnel of candidates, allocated more of your time to recruiting, implemented a recruiting best practices process, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on recruiting fees?

So have you solved your recruiting problems? Probably not.

The number one goal of recruiting is to make sure that who you hire is absolutely the best fit for the role. Achieving that goal is not just about interviewing more candidates, recruiting more efficiently, or attracting the most talented people – even though those are all critical steps in the recruiting process.

It actually starts with figuring out the true ROLE that you expect the hire to play and the MEASURE of success to that role when the person actually fulfills it.

A great reading on the topic is Who: The A Method for Hiring, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. Here’s what they recommend as the four fundamentals of recruiting:

  • Scorecard: The scorecard is a document that describes exactly what you want a person to accomplish in a role. It is not a job description, but rather a set of outcomes and competencies that define a job done well. By defining performance for a role, the scorecard gives you a clear picture of what the person you seek needs to be able to accomplish.
  • Source: Finding great people is getting harder, but it is not impossible. Systematic sourcing before you have slots to fill ensures you have high-quality candidates waiting when you need them.
  • Select: Selecting talent in the A Method involves a series of structured interviews that allow you to gather the relevant facts about a person so you can rate your scorecard and make an informed hiring decision. These structured interviews break the voodoo hiring spell.
  • Sell: Once you identify people you want on your team through selection, you need to persuade them to join. Selling the right way ensures you avoid the biggest pitfalls that cause the very people you want the most to take their talents elsewhere. It also protects you from the biggest heartbreak of all: losing the perfect candidate at the eleventh hour.

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.