Hiring The Best Employees – The Effective Way
We all know that hiring the best employees – the absolute best – is hard work. Most potential employees don’t know what they want, don’t know what you want, and can possibly suck tons of time and energy from your hiring search by wasting everybody’s time.
Avoid Applicants with “Split-Focus”
I recruit a lot of people for companies – hundreds of interns, employees for multi-million dollar companies – the works. When I screen people during the interview, the first thing I focus on if they have a “split-focus“.
Too many potential hires have a “What am I going to get out of it?” mentality. They ask simplistic questions like, “How much will I have to work?” and “When is the vacation time?” immediately after starting the interview. This is the type of employee you want to avoid.
In fact, when people ask me “How much will I earn?” as the first thing during an interview, I will immediately remove them out of consideration. Disqualified. I don’t have time for split-focus, and neither should you.
Avoid these types at all costs
Pursue Applicants Who Offer Value First
Hiring the best employees is about finding the people that can do something for you. Your company is on their mind, 24/7. They view the interview as a way to provide value to the company, not as a hand-out or a free lunch.
Your ability to screen for focus and bring in people who will expand the value in your company may just make or break your success in the long-term.
Screen For Their Level of Focus
One of my favorite ways to make sure I’m hiring the best employees is giving them a simple set of tasks to see that they can perform it in an adequate amount of time and give the level of focus my client needs.
The 24-Hour Challenge:
Give him immediately a task to operate and solve in 24 hours. This will put on him a good amount of positive stress and allow you to understand how he actually works. It will actually give you an idea of his overall commitment level while at the same time making him invest in your team and allowing the candidate to get an impression of what his future with you will be.
The 1-Week Assignment:
Once the 24 hours assignment is successfully completed, you want to replicate the same idea while stretching it over an entire week. Assign more complex tasks. Ask him to call different parts of your company to complete a job, but tell him or her how to do it. Check their decision making skills and their ability to complete a task on their own two feet.
Over time, you or client is going to need to delegate responsibility. If a person cannot complete a simple 1-week assignment and find a way to accomplish the goal, it is likely they are suffering from split-focus.
Screen mindset and attitude
When interviewing your candidates make sure to check their attitude towards the team and their own role in it. You want to hire who display optimal value bringer attitude.
A value bringer is someone who focus on adding value to your team and thinks creatively on how to solve problems and bring overall improvement first.
Such candidate will ask you questions like “How can I help you improve this specific task in this specific interval of time?” first rather than ones as “What will it be my pay check and what will I get in return?”
Focus on hiring value bringers and immediately discard value suckers or candidates with a split focus, as this will greatly improve your business on the long run and will allow you to create an healthy environment of win-win cooperation with your employees.
