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Nightingale-Conant presents Tom Gegax

Hire Slow, Fire Fast!

Hiring after one interview — no probing, no references, no work-history review — is like hopping a red-eye to Vegas to get married after one date. It's impulsive and expensive, and your chances of long-term harmony are abysmal.

The more time invested on the front end, the less likely the chance of getting bitten on the back end. Shortcuts are tempting, especially when a candidate's personality, résumé, and references are intoxicating. The swoon is like puppy love, like the candidate's been delivered by divine decree. Watch out. In my haste to eliminate "fill vacancy" from my to-do list, I've committed the old college sin of "wishing 'em beautiful and willing 'em brilliant." In my zeal to upgrade my top execs, for instance, I blundered. I assumed that seasoned vets from Corporate America would have more knowledge and skills than people already on my team. Yes, it may be necessary to recruit heavy hitters for a specialized slot like CFO. But big-company outsiders, particularly those prone to bureaucratic thinking — numbers over names, politics over performance, lack of urgency — often clashed with our caring, service-oriented, entrepreneurial culture.

Take the vice president we lured from a Fortune 500 firm. He floored me one day with a passing remark. "Oh, I forgot to tell you," he said, "Darren, the manager of our Richfield store, told me he wasn't happy about some things. I told him if he wasn't happy, he could find another place to work." I'm almost certain steam began pouring from my ears. "You've gotta be kidding," I said, barely controlling my anger. " 'Like it or lump it' is not the way we do things around here. That's a clear violation of our mission, vision, and values. Darren's a big-time performer, and he's the last guy we want to lose. If he's got complaints, we need to hear him out." I called Darren as soon as I could. It was too late. He had just accepted an offer from another company.

Serves me right. I never should have hired that veep in the first place. He blinded me with his credentials, charisma, and championship schmoozing. I even circumnavigated our own rigorous hiring process. Not that he was without talent. He could shuffle paper, crank out memos, and market himself like a Madison Avenue pro. Man, did he snow me. It took me a year and a half to realize he never actually did any real work. After I asked for his resignation, I discovered that everyone else had seen right through him for some time. Wiping the egg off my face, I vowed to never again flip-flop that wise old adage, "Hire slow, fire fast." Even if the gaping hole you're trying to fill grows wider by the day, don't panic. Take the prudent approach. Plugging the wrong person into a key position is like applying a Band-Aid to an infected wound. By the time you realize you're in trouble, the damage may be irreparable.

Seat-of-the-pantsers typically put mediocre employees in charge of hiring. Big mistake. It takes a sharp person to recognize a fellow thoroughbred — and to be delighted, not intimidated, by the person's star power. Leverage the street smarts of some elite performers by placing them in the interviewer's chair.

Fear factor: Some managers don't want their socks knocked off. Sure, it's only human nature to feel threatened by someone who can do your job better than you can. But the only way to build a strong team is to hire the best people you can find. Sharper people challenge you to grow and make your business more productive, and guess who will look smarter then? If you hire only people you feel intellectually superior to, you'll wind up holding yourself hostage to a bunch of deadwood subordinates who won't even sharpen a pencil until you approve it. And that sets the dominoes in motion. Inevitably, the really good people leave, the really bad people are fired, and all that's left is a hot, steaming pile of mind-numbing mediocrity. If that's your idea of paradise, why are you reading this article?

QUALITY QUESTIONS
Stripping the Guesswork Out of Hiring

Interviewing a job candidate is like asking your teenager how school was that day. You won't find out what's worth knowing until you ask just the right questions in just the right way. When playing the Hiring Game, it's crucial to arm yourself with probing, openended questions. Why? Most job seekers know the drill inside and out. They're skilled at telling you what they think you want to hear and, more important, at suppressing details they don't want you to hear. But that, my friend, is exactly the information you need to know.

Before launching into a friendly grilling, level the playing field a bit and ease into the conversation. I'd thank a prospect for considering us and acknowledge that she was interviewing us as much as we were interviewing her. I'd emphasize that we'd each benefit from total candor, noting that important details that didn't surface could come back to haunt us later. I'd promise not to oversell my offer and ask her to return the favor.

After stating our company's mission, vision, and values, I'd pepper her with thought-provoking questions arranged under eight themes. I'd do my best to come across as both caring and curious, probing but not prosecutorial. Through tone and body language, I'd lob even the most challenging questions up like softballs. I'd encourage her to go with the first response that came to mind and let her do 70 percent of the talking.

The interview checklist:

1. Job History. Start with the basics and add a twist. To understand a prospect's experience, ask about her last three jobs.

• What was your job description, and what did you actually do?
• What did you love about the job, and what did you hate?
• How would you rate your boss, and why?
• Did you leave the job or did the job leave you? What exactly happened?

The kicker? Don't ask what her last supervisor thought about the quality of her work. Instead, ask, What will your supervisor say about you when I call? Odds are you'll get a more honest, revealing answer because she's probably thinking, Uh-oh, I better come clean.

2. Hard work and initiative. These questions determine a job seeker's capacity to work hard and smart.

• Walk me through a typical day at your most recent job (or the one most relevant to the position under discussion). How did you feel about each element?
• What were your biggest contributions to your last employer?
• What are some on-the-job examples of your going beyond the call of duty?
• Tell me about the times you underperformed. What did you do about it?
• What is your understanding of what this job requires?
• How many hours did you work at your last job, and how many do you expect to work at this job?

3. Integrity. Don't pass up the opportunity to stress your zero tolerance for unethical behavior. Why? People with integrity deficits assume that everyone else shares their twisted concept of right and wrong. That's how they rationalize ethical shortcuts. Weed out the bad apples with these questions:

• Everyone has bent or broken a rule at one time or another. What was one of your recent transgressions, and what did you learn from it?
• Are all rules valid?
• If you felt a rule was unfair, what would you do about it?
• Have you ever broken a rule to satisfy a customer? If so, how?
• Which is more important, customer service or making a profit? Why?

4. Judgment. These four questions help you judge the maturity of a candidate's thought processes and the quality of her decision making.

• Tell me about a few good decisions you made recently.
• What was the toughest work-related decision you've made?
• Describe the biggest calculated risk you've ever taken.
• Why would this be a good place for you to work?

5. Ambition. My eyebrows raise when a prospect makes even a modest attempt to define her career dreams. It makes me more confident that she's selective about the job she wants. Suddenly, an image of a hardworking, productive employee snaps into focus. These questions help you glimpse a candidate's career vision.

• What are your short-term and longterm career goals, and why?
• How are you going to accomplish them?
• What alternative careers are you pondering, and why?
• Why did you apply for this position?
• How does this job help you meet your career goals?

6. Personality. My hiring philosophy is simple — avoid surprises. With the interview now more than halfway through, remind her that the more you know about each other the better. Agreement secured, ask a series of tough, unorthodox questions to gauge her emotional and psychological maturity.

• What's the happiest you've ever been, and why?
• What makes you sad?
• What scares you?
• What makes you laugh?
• What really made you mad at your last job? What did you do about it?
• Describe a poorly handled encounter with a colleague. What would you do differently today?
• How would you react if a colleague or customer yelled at you?
• How well do you work under pressure and deadlines?
• When do you find you are not a team player?
• What is your greatest accomplishment?
• Tell me about your most spectacular failure.
• Tell me about three big changes you've made in your life and what you learned from each.

A touchy issue to keep in mind: I was a big proponent of standardized psychological testing for high-level managerial positions. Even though there are legal risks to consider, it's a good way to make sure a candidate's personality, world view, temperament, and work ethic match the rest of the team's. If a prospect was a square peg who would fit snugly into our square hole, I knew we could train and integrate her.

7. Self-analysis. You need clarity about a candidate's strengths and vulnerabilities to know if she's a magical match. Generic, open-ended questions like What are your greatest strengths? yield only marginally useful information. Instead, list a dozen or so topics — organizational skills, computer proficiency, time management, customer service, reaction to change, work ethic, teamwork — relevant to the open position. Begin with the first subject and ask her to rate her skill from 1/10. Follow up with, What will it take to get you to a 10?

8. Compensation. With two questions, you'll zero in on a salary you'll both be comfortable with. First, ask, What would you like to make? After she gives a figure, ask, What's the minimum you'd feel good about? It's a question rarely asked. She'll hesitate. Be patient while she runs through a quick analysis in her head: If the number's too low, I'll cheat myself. If it's too high, he'll lose interest in me. I call this the "Goldilocks Strategy" because people feel compelled to shoot you a number that's juuust right.

It's worth noting that we never hemmed in people with strict salary guidelines. If we settled on above-market pay, we told new hires we expected above-market productivity. After all, it's not what you pay that's important, it's what you get for what you pay. Which would you rather have — nine highly productive self-starters earning 11 percent more than average, or 10 average performers earning an average salary?

By this point in the process, I'd have a sense of whether I wanted to shift the interview into higher gear or hit the brakes. If the light was green, I'd give her the hard sell on the career opportunities we could offer her. Why? A superstar candidate has likely wowed other suitors. If you're impressed, throttle up to make sure she's just as impressed with you. First, repeat your company's mission, vision, and values. Then connect the dots from that corporate DNA to information gleaned from the interview: "You said you had a passion for serving customers. That's great, because it's an important part of our mission." Finish up by giving her a tour and introducing her to others she'd be working with. Helping her begin to feel at home will reduce the stress that accompanies a career move.

FULL CIRCLE
Pointing Underachievers Toward the Exit

It's only natural to close an article on hiring with a few words on firing — or, as I like to call it, freeing up someone's future for more suitable work. In the early days, I was so doggedly caring and loyal that I terminated people only for serious underperformance or egregious offenses. It was a major shift to realize that welfare management — failing to adequately hold people accountable and allowing the wrong people to stay in key positions — hurts everyone. It took years to learn to be both compassionate and tough. Once I balanced my personal resolutions with my professional responsibilities, the termination process took on a life of its own. In fact, it often culminated with an underachieving employee offering to terminate himself.

My corporate Darwinism also generated a boomerang effect. The more I challenged others to grow, the more I was challenged myself. I told my executive committee that if my own skills couldn't keep pace, I'd do the honorable thing and bow out. As majority shareholder and chairman, I had the power to replace myself as CEO and president and was fully prepared to do so.

Deciding whether to free up someone's future demands a detached viewpoint. Detachment does not imply callousness. It simply means caring deeply, but from an objective place. Ask yourself, Does this person have what it takes to get the job done? Hopefully, you're now better equipped to answer that question. Personnel pioneer Robert Half had a nice way of putting it:

Hold people accountable for performance. A commitment to kindness and compassion must be complemented by tough love. Require outstanding results and challenge people to raise their competency ceiling.

Think of yourself as a top talent scout. Landing the hot hire requires diligence and resourcefulness. Keep a lot of balls in the air — work your business contacts, offer referral bonuses, hit schools and hiring fairs, consider search firms. Make sure your culture attracts and retains great people.

© 2008 Nightingale-Conant, Inc. All rights reserved.