Hiring 101

My mind has recently been blown by Dave Ramsey, yet again, for the 100th time.  I was reading his newest book titled “Enterleadership” which is a practical guide for managing a business.

His approach, like always, is extreme but it just makes so much sense to me, who is coming from a company that uses the exact opposite approach, and pays dearly for it time and time again.

His strategy is to give a potential team-member 6 to 10 interviews over the span of 3 months before finally offering them a job.  When reading this initially I was like, “ya, thats just way too much” but when I considered that by the time I put someone through such a hiring process, and I still want them, and they still want the job, they are here to stay.  For good.

I mean honestly, do you really want to try someone out on the job?  Why?  When you can try them out at no cost to you before they even start.

And more importantly, why do employers try to cast a wide net when posting job descriptions and trying to collect resumes?  This really makes no sense at all.  When you put up a job posting you need to think about what your goal is.  Do you really want to get a large stack of resumes to toil over or would you prefer that the wrong people get enough information to take themselves out of the running.  Do you really want to interview a bunch of people who aren’t even in the ball park?  Of course not.  So make your job description really really clear and as long as you need to.  You should be trying to get as few resumes as possible, but from the right people who are really looking for the job you have to offer.

I just spent the entire day yesterday helping a fellow manager in his task of interviewing 30 candidates for a sales job.  Out of 30 there were only four that I would even consider giving a second interview.  So why did I have to waste my time with the other 26.  If the job description was written properly I would have interviewed only 4 people and could have gotten to the other more important things I had to do.

Do yourself a favour the next time you have a position to fill.  Start the process well before you are desperate to fill the position, and take enough time to weed out the people you don’t want. Hiring and replacing someone is far more costly then putting the proper care and attention into hiring the right person once.

And read Dave Ramsey’s book “Entreleadership” it’s awesome!

How to really lead a company.

So when listening to a podcast of Dave Ramsey’s Entreleadership series I heard about this amazing writer and speaker named Simon Sinek.

This guys has hit the nail on the head with his book titled “Start With Why”.

His main point is that the thing that differentiates great companies from all others is how they portray their reason for doing what they do.  Take a company like Apple for instance. Is it not clear that they love making products that are super sexy and fun to use?  Or that hey want to do it the absolute best way they can, which is different then everyone else doing it?  If you have ever walked into an Apple store, or used one of their products you would know that the answer is yes.  They exude an attitude of, “yeah, this is how we think it should be because this is what we think is the best way to do it”.  End of story and they don’t care about your opinion because they are so freaking confident that they have figured it out.

I really don’t know an average tech consumer who hasn’t loved their apple product or overall experience.  That’s not to say that I don’t know tech geeks who have other opinions on the subject but even they get it.

Well, according to Simon Sinek, this is because Steve Jobs refused to always bring his business back to “why” they were doing what they were doing.

So without further a due, check out this video to hear it from the horse’s mouth.