Today is my third blog on what deadly mistakes you can make when hiring someone. Last week we looked at the issue of focussing on the wrong thing while hiring, which is a very common problem. This week we are going to look at something which usually takes a lot of practise to learn: how to avoid the meaningless filler people tell you in interviews and get to the important stuff that will show you whether you should hire a person. This is essential to be able to successfully Build Your Team.
So I’ve created this seven part series on what NOT TO DO when hiring a new staff member:
1. Making the job ad too good to be true.
2. Focussing on education, “experience” and
other wastes of time.
3. Listening but not looking.
4. Let’s find someone just like me!
5. Making personality a priority.
6. Not reference checking.
7. Losing the right candidate by not acting fast enough.
THE THIRD DEADLY SIN: Listening but not looking.
This is insanely important. In fact, once you have read this blog perhaps you will see how important it is to apply to managing staff and just about everything else in business.
What you want to find out is usually right there in front of you if you decided to really look. You want to look and find out FACTS not just hear how a person can sell themselves. A person can give you a lot of babble about how good he is, what he has done, how busy he was, and how important he was to the company. The problem is what does busy mean? What does important mean? And pretty soon you realise a lot of these things are based on opinion.
So when you are hiring someone don’t just hear all the “reasons” you should hire this person, but look for the results that the person has produced. I’ll give you an example, you have two sales people: one is sitting on the computer playing with facebook and the other is running around, super busy, working twice the amount of hours, telling people about all the new potential clients he has got and constantly on the phone. Who would you prefer in your company?
The answer is you don’t have enough information. The guy on facebook might have closed a $3mill sale ever day for the last month and so takes most of the day off and the other guy could have not even got an appointment. On the other hand, the salesman on facebook might be trying to avoid work and the other guy is putting in extra effort to beat his weekly sales record.
So if you are going to hire a person, look for the facts you can verify, the sales the person has made or result he has produced. If those are good, sure you can listen to the rest of it but until you know the raw data on his production, I wouldn’t waste my time.
Alexander Bell
National Course Supervisor
Performia Australia
alex@performia.com.au
Ph: 1800 603 023
©2011 Performia Australia Pty Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Performia Australiais part of an international business that are experts on helping business owners and managers know how to get the best results from their staff as well as recruit the most productive people to business.
Build Your Team is a revolutionary course which allows business to get more productivity from their staff and hire people who will they know will be exceptional performers.
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