How to Hire Successfully: Focus on Mission, Values, Talent

Like many leaders I feel like I am becoming a hiring expert. Between building my own organization and serving on multiple search committees, I have spent a lot of time thinking about hiring and developing talent. That’s a good thing, because there’s nothing more crucial to the success of an organization than bringing the right people on board and encouraging their growth, especially if you consider a bad hire could cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

So what makes you good at hiring? You need to know who you are as an organization, what you want from your employees, and what process determines if a candidate is a good fit.

Author and teacher Jim Collins calls it “getting the right people on the bus.” It’s his third of five principles that build the framework of a great organization. I have talked about Collins’s first two principles in a recent post. I discussed the differences between executive and legislative leaders he described in Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

I certainly see myself in the latter category. I believe instead of exercising command and control from the top down, the most effective leaders lead by directing from the center of their organizations. Modern leaders empower employees to develop the skills they need to move to the next level in their careers. In the process, they will move their organizations forward, as well.

This attitude towards leadership doesn’t make things easier for decision makers. Quite to the contrary. For this model of leadership to work, it’s not enough for leaders to get rid of the wrong people when things take a turn for the worse. An organization’s success depends on hiring the right people, getting them into the right seats, and giving them opportunities to grow. The challenge is how to get the right people on the bus in the first place.

If you think paying higher wages than your competition is the solution to hiring the best people, you would be wrong, according to Collins. The right employees for your organization must be driven not by money but by your organization’s mission, he says.

“The right people can often attract money, but money by itself can never attract the right people. Money is a commodity; talent is not,” Collins says.

Recruiting and developing talent contributes to an organization’s productivity and growth. Without talent, an organization can’t transform. Without transformation, an organization can’t grow.

Someone who understands this well is consultant Jim Blackburn of SURVE Partners. He points out that personal responsibility, resourcefulness, reliability, resiliency and openness for transformational change characterize growth-oriented and highly productive employees.

Blackburn believes hiring the right people in today’s complex business world is greatly enhanced when companies break with traditional hiring practices.

“We believe that focusing on who the candidate is versus what the candidate has accomplished is more important in hiring the right person,” he says. “It requires adopting a very counterintuitive recruiting approach.”

We are adapting Blackburn’s recruiting approach for NorTech and have filled the first position with this process to great results. It involves using résumés and referrals as rejection instead of selection tools. After a candidate’s qualifications have been established, certain employees within the organization conduct their interviews without having knowledge of the candidate’s professional qualifications. That part of the interviewing process should replicate the work environment as much as possible.

“You want to be able to observe how the candidate responds when fatigued to the mental and emotional challenges of your work place,” Blackburn says, “as well as how they demonstrate possessing the organization’s core foundational values.”

It is critical to get the right leaders in place – and by leaders I mean employees at all levels taking ownership of their work. The search processes I have been involved in were all managed very differently and all with good outcomes (so far). But the process was much less painful if clear objectives were set up front. It is essential that you have clearly defined the organization’s values and goals. It is the role of the board and the search committee to agree on those issues. Only then can you get the right talent in place and have a chance to succeed in challenging circumstances.

All of this means hiring the right people takes a lot of time. And that’s OK. Rushing to bring someone on board can have consequences that linger long after that employee is gone. That’s why you should follow four important steps:

1. Define your organization’s values, vision and goals
2. Find out if your candidates are talented, growth-oriented and mission-driven
3. Interview the candidates for their ability to meet the challenges specific to your organization
4. Carefully decide who the best fit is

If these arguments don’t convince you to hire carefully, consider the costs of hiring the wrong person. Sixty-nine percent of employers said their companies were adversely affected by a bad hire last year, according to a recent study by CareerBuilder. Forty-one percent of those businesses estimated the cost of a bad hire was over $25,000; twenty-four percent said it cost them more than $50,000.

“Whether it’s a negative attitude, lack of follow through or other concern, the impact of a bad hire is significant,” says Rosemary Haefner, vice president of human resources at CareerBuilder. “Not only can it create productivity and morale issues, it can also affect the bottom line.”

In a piece for Fast Company, Likeable Media CEO Carrie Kerpen recently defended the old adage of “hire slow, fire fast.” She argued for measured decision-making when it comes to hiring and explained how her business suffered from bad hires.

“There was a bloodbath,” she writes. “A bloodbath of firings, lost clients, and the morale of the people who were still at the company just plummeted.”

But there are other CEOs who disagree with the notion that you should hire slow and fire fast. Some say they don’t have the luxury of time to wait for the perfect candidate. I would like to hear your thoughts on the topic, how you go about getting the right people on the bus, and what experiences you have had with hiring the wrong people. Post your comments below!

Forbes.com