Selecting And Hiring Customer-Satisfying People ^©

Adapted from his article published in the Christian Management Report Magazine

If you are like the other leaders and professionals I’ve coached over the last three decades, my guess is you would rather concentrate your time on using your technical skills and expertise and doing the things you like to do. However, to grow and maintain an ethically and economically successful career or organization you need to carefully invest some of your time, talent and treasure in mastering the Intentional Hiring Integrity skills. Exemplary leaders do this and consistently gain and keep loyal and satisfied customers.

One of the critical leadership skills you need is related to selecting, hiring, placing and leading customer-satisfying people effectively and efficiently. Do you presently put a top priority on getting and keeping the best person for every position in your organization? Have you mastered the leadership skills necessary to consistently select and effectively lead each member of a “customer-satisfying” staff? The growth and longevity of your career and company is dependent on the character, competence and motivation of the “customer-satisfying” people you select.

During my professional career, I’ve facilitated thousands of Distance Call-A-Coach and face-to-face leadership development coaching sessions with leaders in all types and sizes of organizations. Those who have achieved great personal and career success and who have contributed significantly to the success of their organizations have learned to hire and deploy people well. They have learned to competently do what it takes to consistently select, hire and deploy the right people in the right positions. They have learned to interface and communicate effectively with people as individuals by understanding their unique attributes and motivational drives. They are also clear about their key hiring values. How much do you value what these selection and leadership champions value?

1. Getting and maintaining maximum control over the hiring process in order to save valuable time and money? Quickly and easily building and maintaining a high integrity office culture that will facilitate the achievement of your worthwhile goals and satisfy your customers?

2. Using computerized selection technology like the Professional Dynametric Program we use 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?

3. Placing people into positions that are motivating to them and allowing them to function at their natural best, to be freed up to produce well and collaborate positively with you?

4. Deterring the Peter Principle in your organization to ensure that profit margins are healthy and that boondoggles are nonexistent?

5. Supporting your people by flexibly applying your leadership and managerial skills -- matching and capitalizing on each person’s natural motivation characteristics, unique communication style, and strongest talents?

Be a responsible Intentional Hiring Integrity leader by improving your selection, placement and leadership abilities. Gain 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, to name a few? You will gain a more realistic picture of what wrong hiring practices are costing you by completing the assessment below.

Cost Assessment of a Wrong Hire

Sit down with two other people, your secretary and a trusted colleague. Calculate together what you spent on the most aggravating wrong hire who was on your payroll for over 90 days.

$ Impact on Your Personal/Professional Time                   Estimated Dollar Equivalent

More extensive orientation required....................................

Closer supervision required..................................................

Extra employee questions.....................................................

Extra on-the-job observations ..............................................

Extra observation reports......................................................

Extra performance memos....................................................

Extra performance conferences............................................

Performance conference reports..........................................

Extra disciplinary actions.......................................................

Extra disciplinary reports.......................................................

Extra evaluation reports..........................................................

Listening and responding to extra staff complaints.............

Listening and responding to extra customer complaints.....

$ Wasted on key support person's time for the above.........

Copy paper................................................................................

$ Impact on Your Effectiveness

Distraction from your work........................................................

Distracting from your strategic leadership thinking/actions..

Personal absenteeism due to stress created illness ............

$ Impact on Your Operating Budget?

Lost salary..................................................................................

Lost productivity.........................................................................

Lost credibility with customers ................................................

Lost business............................................................................

Lost advertising, recruitment, interviewing and hiring time..

$ Impact on Other Staff Members During Office Time

Fear of "me too" loss of job....................................................

Stress and productivity time lost............................................

Absenteeism time....................................................................

Gossip time...............................................................................

Resentments and emotional distraction time........................

$ Impact on Your Staff Development Budget

Outside seminars and workshops..........................................

Staff coaching and other help provided..................................

$ Impact of Dismissal Costs/Arbitration

Legal services............................................................................

Staff involvement........................................................................

Deposition time for staff............................................................

Buy-out .......................................................................................

Wrongful dismissal settlement..................................................

                                                                                     Total cost $ _________________

The obsolete managerial thinking of "Gotta be, wanna be, better be!" and the costly mentality of "Fit in or you're fired!" just don't contribute to making a productive, profitable career or enterprise. People are the key to your success ... staff members and customers alike!

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 job as a leader is to assure that each person you select possesses the unique, natural motivational profile that allows them to fit into your particular office culture. Also, they need the character and competencies for successfully carrying out the tasks and functions required of the position they are to fill on your office team.

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.

Given the high and unnecessary cost of wrong hiring, selecting the right “customer-satisfying” people is a critical investment in the long-term success and growth of your practice. Think about it! Isn’t gaining and maintaining “customer-satisfying” people an investment worthy of a small amount of your time and a little bit of your money over the long haul? Add to this some major personal benefits that will accrue to you when you select the right staff members.

As a leader, you know how critical it is that you gain and to maintain the personal reserves you need to build a balanced, bountiful and beneficial life and maintain a successful professional practice. I address the “personal reserves” issue in my book, Intentional Integrity. Here I use the Wheel of Life as a metaphor to help readers examine the core values at the “hub” of their lives and to measure the relative balance between the different dimensions or “spokes” of their lives.

As I discuss in the book, only you can be responsible for gaining and maintaining the necessary emotional, physical, financial and time reserves you need to keep your life in good balance and to give your best to your customers. Count on it - wrong hiring will always eat away at every one of your vital reserves! I see it happening to “driven” professionals and executives day in and day out, eventually destroying their health, their marriages and their enterprises!

Isn’t now the time for you to place a strong value on proper selection and hiring and to seriously engage yourself in implementing the steps in the process? You’ll benefit from it! Your staff members will trust that they are there because they were skillfully selected, and were determined to be the best person with the highest motivation, character and competence to fill their particular positions successfully.

If you're like most leaders, there have been times you've experienced your life filled with stress and felt like your family life, career and company were being put in jeopardy when you made a bad hiring decision. When you’ve made good hiring decisions, the people you hired always made you look good and feel good! Have you experienced both?

How much more secure would you feel if you knew, with 95% assurance, that you were selecting only the top 10% producers for every position? Impossible? Not at all! Focused job ads, proven interviewing strategies and advanced scientific assessment technology will help you select, with 95% accuracy, the person from your top applicants who best matches the profile of your top 10% producers.

One critical key to high integrity hiring is getting an ideal match of a person's natural motivational strengths with those required for a particular position in your office. 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 office. Each new person will add to the ranks of your top 10% producers and more easily and quickly get the quality and quantity of work done that the position requires.

Make and save more money and gain and maintain customers more easily. Take the 10 steps successful Intentional Hiring Integrity champions take:

1. Assess and define the key operating values, key aspects of your organization’s culture and your most important customer service expectations.

2. List the competencies needed by a person to successfully fill each position.

3. List the character traits and virtues that compliment your organization’s stated operating values and which you desire staff members to possess.

4. Develop a “performance champion’s” profile for each position. Use the combined computerized profiles of your top 20% performers for a given position.

5. 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!

6. Increase the motivational draw of your ads and internal announcements. Save yourself valuable time by including language that will most likely attract the people to match the job requirements of the position you are advertising.

7. Get each applicant’s commitment to participate in a Personal Accountability Commitment Team (PACT) process. Make this process (described in the book, Intentional Integrity) part of all of your regular staff meetings. This deters people of low character, competence and motivation from formally applying. Also it prevents the wasting your time and money and putting you, your customers and your enterprise in jeopardy.

8. 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 your valuable time conducting face-to-face interviews.

9. Use scientific technology, like the Professional Dynametric Program computerized management reports, to assess your top candidates' specific motivational traits (dominance, extroversion, energy, pace, conformity-structure, thrust, allegiance, tenaciousness, kinetic energy and logic) with 95% accuracy. This will assure you that each candidate you select will perform comparable to your top 10% producers before you hire them! Assess their integrity, substance abuse, reliability, and work ethic using something like the STEP ONE computerized assessment we use.

10. Use each staff member’s motivational profile and their management report to lead and guide them in ways that best capitalize on their natural motivators, gifts and talents. Will putting a focus on Intentional Hiring Integrity become a top priority for you? Do you see the benefits of selecting and hiring the right people?

Best of success to you as you become increasingly skillful at selecting the very best people to serve you and your customers!