Guy Kawasaki’s Art of Recruting is a Top 10 List that separates the Art from the Science. It’s a must read if you are hiring passionate people.
- Hire better than yourself
- Hire infected people
- Ignore the relevant
- Double check your intuition
- Check independent references
- Apply the shopping cart test
- Use all your weapons
- Sell all the decision makers
- Wait to compensate
- Don’t assume you’re done
I long to work for a start-up again, due to personal reasons, I am having to be the responsible one. Part of this desire, is based on that most entrepreneurs understand the value of the early-stage team to the success of their vision. (My assumption is that for smaller organizations the need for immediate value is much greater than a lumbering dinosaur). Joe Kraus of Excite talks about the hiring practices of start-ups.
- a bad employee does far more damage than no employee, no matter the issue
- A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you’re only two generations away from death
"Any hiring process should focus on never letting in a bad fit. Even if that means accidentally rejecting a lot of people that would be good fits. Said another way, it optimizes for no false positives, even at the expense of false negatives."
This is a completely different mentality from my current employer. We focus on meeting the "minimum requirements" which are pretty much:
- Is the applicant eligible to work in Canada?
- Does the applicant meet the minimum education or experience as specified in the job description?
- Are they breathing?
I am not a recruiting or human capital expert, but I am pretty sure that this is a receipe for disaster. Can an organization that has a culture that resists changes, rewards seniority and sameness, and shuns responsibility/accountability hire and keep A players? Do A Players move on quickly after identifying organizations like this?
Tools like RecruitSoft, Hire.com or other recruiting tools can help you identify the right candidates. ThinkShed can help you identify the right employees. And Enboard.com can help you keep them. But it all stems from senior executive (or board) support to change.
<vent>Ahhhhhh, I love it when there is no incentive for employees or organizations to change. Hence the nature of government (all levels), large organizations, universities, and other institutions where there are no metrics or measures that tie senior management to performance goals, never mind individual employee performance to strategic goals. Building fiefdoms and personal politics, that about describes the organization I currently work for. It must be time for me to move on!</vent>