Top 5 Hiring Lessons From the Nation’s Best Execs

By John Heaney on July 28, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Featured, Hiring, Management

I’ve collected a number of articles and interviews with some of the country’s most innovative and successful executives to discern exactly how they attract highly talented and energized employees to their organizations that continually fuel their success.

There was a lot of overlap and similarity between these successful hiring execs that centered around several consitent themes:

1. Always hire talent, even if you don’t have the perfect spot for them yet. The single most difficult task of any executive is finding and retaining talent. If you discover a gem of an employee, hire them and create a role for them. You never regret adding creativity, ingenuity and intelligence to your team.
2. Ask questions that require them to tell stories about their experience. Resumes are filled with dates, sales targets met, percentages of quota filled and numbers of direct reports. But these recitations of statistics and static observations don’t tell whether the job seeker will fit into your company and culture. Ask them to describe in detail how they managed their greatest failure. Or how they managed to get corporate support for a new, unusual product launch. How do they work? Who do they work with? What do they value? If their answers match your culture, grab them up.
3. Culture always trumps strategy. One lesson learned by virtually every executive is that a brilliant mind doesn’t always result in a successful employee. If the new employee doesn’t share your values and embrace the way you conduct business, they will not work out for you long term. They never do. Hire to culture, not just capabilities.
4. Rely on referrals for your best candidates. Put the word out to your network of friends and business associates announcing what you’re looking for and let your network generate a stream of referrals. Your friends will only refer those they believe are truly capable of doing the job because if the candidate fails, the referrer’s reputation is similarly diminished.
5. Don’t focus solely on hiring talent from your industry. It’s predicted that the average graduate coming out of college today will likely have dozens of jobs and will switch careers entirely several times during their worklife. Hire talent, aptitude and attitude, not specific industry skills. These are the people that can step into the roles that don’t even exist yet.