Hire
Only The Best People: A Key To Optimum Profitability
This printable personal coaching session is designed to share with you some action steps you can take that will save you the financial, time and emotional costs associated with hiring the wrong person. Like it or not, for better or worse, you live with the people you select! If you are like the other professionals I’ve coached over the last three decades, my guess is you would rather concentrate your time on doing the leadership and managerial tasks that capitalize on your highest expertise and talents.
One of my favorite quotes on the subject speaks the truth. "When you hire people that are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are." R. H. Grant
The growth and maintenance of an ethically and economically successful enterprise calls for you to carefully invest some of your time, talent and treasure in mastering the skills of Intentional Hiring Integrity.
The leadership and managerial skills you need are related to selecting, hiring, placing and leading people from an ethical and an economical perspective. Do you presently put a top priority on getting and keeping the best person for every position in your sphere of leadership? Have you mastered the managerial and leadership skills necessary to consistently select and effectively lead a “customer-satisfying” staff?
Those who have achieved great personal success in their careers and contributed significantly to the success of their organizations have learned to hire well. They have learned to competently do what it takes to consistently select, hire and place the right people... the top 10% performers! They have learned to interface effectively with their staff members as a leader and manager. They are also clear about their key “hiring” values. How much do you value what these “selection and leadership champions” value?
Getting and maintaining maximum control over the hiring process in order to save valuable time and money?
Quickly and easily build and maintain a high integrity office culture that will facilitate the achievement of your worthwhile goals and satisfy your customers?
Using computerized selection technology to aid you in selecting highly motivated people who will perform like your top 10% producers... people of high character and competence who are motivated to satisfy your customers?
Placing people into positions that are motivating to them and allow them to function at their natural best... to be freed up to produce well and collaborate excellently with you?
Deterring the Peter Principle in your office to ensure that profit margins are healthy and that boondoggles are nonexistent?
Supporting your people by flexibly and excellently applying your leadership and managerial skills by matching and capitalizing on each person’s natural motivation characteristics, unique communication style, and strongest talents?
Get motivated to improve your selection, placement and leadership abilities by gaining a tough-minded knowledge about the true costs of wrong hiring. The money you spend on a person’s recruitment, screening, orientation, salary and benefits is obvious. However, what about the dollars, time and energy wasted because of added stress, employee discontent, absenteeism and turnover, customer dissatisfaction, extra supervisory time, documentation and dismissal time, legal expenses and the potential of wrongful dismissal awards?
You can gain a more realistic picture of what wrong hiring practices are costing you if your order a free copy of my Cost Assessment of a Wrong Hire form by contacting me by e-mail at MacAdam@PALConsulting.net.
Like a finely made key that properly fits a quality lock, the people you hire need to “fit in” and easily enter the culture or “front door” of your office. I call this fitting the office culture. Your responsibility as a leader is to assure that each person you select possesses the unique, natural, motivational profile that allows him to fit appropriately into your particular office culture and core operating values. Also, he must possess the character, competencies and motivated commitment for successfully carrying out the tasks and functions required.
Studies have shown that the costs of hiring tower over advertising, sales promotion, public relations, or other marketing-related business expenditures. Based on customer satisfaction studies, you’ll find that only 4% of your customers who are dissatisfied will tell you they are! Ninety-six percent will simply go elsewhere to try a new dentist and 91% never come back! Each dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about their dissatisfaction and one in five will tell twenty people how dissatisfied they are!
From a “satisfied customer” perspective, your satisfied customers will tell at least five people about you. Nine of ten will return if a serious problem is resolved on the spot and seven of ten will return if you eventually resolve the problem.
One critical key to high integrity hiring is getting an ideal match of a person's natural motivational strengths with those required of a particular position in your organization. When you do this, you'll get new staff members who will interface well with you and the other staff members and professionals in your organization. Each new person will add to the ranks of your top 10% producers. Everyone will more easily and quickly get the desired quality and quantity of work done.
Make and save more money and gain and maintain customers more easily! Take the 10 action steps highly successful leaders take:
Assess and define your organization’s key operating values and key aspects of your culture and your most important customer service expectations.
List the competencies needed by a person to successfully fill each position.
List the character traits and virtues you desire of staff members... those that compliment your organization’s stated operating values.
Develop a “performance champion’s” profile for each position. Use the combined computerized profiles of your top 10% performers for a given position.
Design Proactive Interview Questions prior to interviewing. Determine the right content and structure for each question so it elicits accomplishments, not rhetoric or theory, from the person being interviewed!
Increase the motivational draw of your ads and internal announcements. Save yourself valuable time by including language that will attract the people most likely to match the requirements of the position you are advertising.
Get each applicant’s commitment to participate in a Personal Accountability Commitment Team (PACT) process. Make this process (Described in my Intentional Integrity and Intentional Personal Integrity books available on the Book Section of my web site.) part of all of your regular staff meetings. This deters people of low character, competence and motivation from formally applying. It also prevents wasting your time, wasting your money, and putting you, your customers and your company in jeopardy.
Use short, qualifying phone interviews and carefully check out each person’s references and employment history. This will help you determine "next step" candidates. Do this before you waste time conducting face-to-face interviews.
Use scientific technology
(Like the Professional DynaMetric Programs ProScan computerized management reports I use to serve my clients) to assess your top candidates'
specific motivational traits (dominance, extroversion, energy, pace,
conformity-structure, thrust, allegiance, tenaciousness, kinetic energy and
logic) with over 90% accuracy. This
will assure you that each candidate you select will perform comparable to
your top 10% producers before you hire them!
Use each staff member’s profile and their management report to lead and guide them in ways that best capitalize on their natural motivators, gifts and talents.
Empowering After Thoughts
“Acquired knowledge is potential power. Only acquired knowledge diligently applied is empowering.”
Millard MacAdam
I
urge you to invest some time in reflectively thinking about what you have read
and learned from this Tactical Tip.
On a pad of paper, or in your personal growth journal, write to these three questions.