Ask any entrepreneur what keeps them up at night, and their answer will be “hiring the right people.” The composition of your staff is the single biggest predictor of your success as a business owner, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood areas.
I was reading yesterday some study (and I forget who sent it to me) that said that adding an interview to the employment process improved your chances of getting the right person by 2%. That seems blasphemous when everyone you know got their job because of an interview, but the truth is that interviews are given by people not trained in interviewing, and interviews are performed by people not trained in acing an interview.
Gut feel is the culprit, and it’s something that’s universal. Universally wrong, that is. That’s one of the reasons I teach benchmarking. So much of what we assume about hiring is bad knowledge passed on from generation to generation. It wasn’t that along ago that staffing firms hired young men based on the shoes they were wearing or depending on whether they played a sport in college (that’s no joke – those are real people interviewing with those questions).
For me, the need to hire the right people transformed my thinking about hiring. My job was to hire the right people for my client, but when I looked at my internal staff, it was clear that I wasn’t getting what I wanted. So I started to look around for what drove interview success. When I found the answers, which involve benchmarking, personality assessments, and behavioral interviewing, I applied them to my own internal hires.
And then it hit me. If it works for me, it will absolutely work for my clients. And the idea for KeenAlignment was born. So when I call you on the phone, I’m not selling something because a boss decided to push a product on their salespeople. I’m selling something I believe in because it worked for me.
Hiring the right people is the most important job you have, as an owner or as a manager. What are you doing to make sure you’re doing that job right?
Call me. Margaret Graziano. 1-888-484-5551
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