Hiring Disfunction #2 - Winging It
I spoke with a friend of mine recently who
specializes in helping companies hire and
manage sales professionals.
She was laughing and telling me about a client
who called her one afternoon and yelled at
her because her system didn't work and he
wanted his money back! He'd hired someone
who turned out (in a very short period of time)
to be mean, abusive and quite un-salesperson like.
She asked the business owner where he'd gotten
the candidate. She asked him how his interview
and test results were. She asked him what kind
of compensation the business owner had offered him.
None of the answers synched up with the plan they
had built to hire sales people for the company.
In short, he'd executed none of the careful plan
they had built to ensure he made great hires.
He just met a friend who knew a guy, took they guy
to lunch, hired him on the spot and paid him what
he asked for.
No system - bad result.
I'm beginning to think that life really is just
one continual test to see if we will implement
the things we know we're supposed to be doing.
I know it's hard - time flies by; pressures are
bigger than ever; we want to taste the 'magic'
of trusting our intuition and having it work out;
we want to avoid any really difficult work we can.
But those things don't change the facts.
No system - bad result.
Organizational hiring disfunction number two is
really nothing more than this...multiplied.
Consider one of our clients. We helped their IT
department hire a project manager who did quite
well there. But the reason the CTO in this company
hired us in the first place was that in his
first two months on the job he met people from
five other departments (manufacturing, marketing,
design, administration and sales) who didn't seem
to have a clue as to what they were supposed to
do. They were all amazed that they'd taken jobs
that turned out to be nothing like they appeared
to be in the interviews.
They worked for a brand-name clothing manufacturer,
with a dedicated HR team that (despite our
success) politely told us our ideas weren't
sophisticated enough for them.
The HR team leased a $25,000 per year HR technology
designed to....(drum roll) - help managers hire
and improve the performance of new employees.
They knew what to do. Even had a really cool
tool. They just weren't doing it. And no one was
making them. And they had at least five highly paid professionals sucking up $250-300,000
per year in salary who probably weren't the right
people for their jobs.
Add in the $25,000 for the HR tool that was
just an HR toy, and any new executive would have
an easy time finding ways to improve the bottom line.
Kind of depressing if you're the one writing
the checks.
Look, this stuff is simple. If you've never done
it you can learn it on the fly. If you know how
to do it, there's only one reason you're not...
We can build you a system, teach you to use it,
put into your brain everything you need to hire,
manage and motivate people. We can even coach you
regularly - help you manage and stay accountable,
run some of the systems for you so you can't mess
it up.
But when it all comes down to gut-check time, you
either do the work and stick to the plan, or you don't.
Own it. Or call us and we'll help you own it!
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