My current company hired me six years ago to build a new division. This would require setting up a number of specialized departments and the operation would have a substantial impact on the company’s profitibility, so there was a lot on the line.
I started out with only about a dozen employees. Fortunately, three of them were gifted individuals who became my management team. However, to build the division we needed to do a lot of hiring.
We faced three challenges in hiring:
- Quality. Our goal was to create the best operation in the industry so we set our hiring standard very high.
- Skills. Our industry requires employees with strong technical knowledge as well as skills in communication, decision-making, and planning.
- Speed. Our business was growing rapidly so we needed to hire a lot of people in a hurry.
We initiated an aggressive nationwide recruiting campaign for experienced employees. At first we got lucky and hired some superb people with great experience and skills. Then the talent pool went dry for a while and we kissed a lot of frogs. (Is that a mixed metaphor or just a slightly flawed one?)
When we hired our first employees we told them their workloads would be lower than at other companies but the expectations for quality and results would be extremely high. They enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to do their jobs right rather than just churn work. Unfortunately, as we went through the hiring drought our business grew a lot faster than our staff and our employees’ workloads started to climb above the level we had promised them.
Several times we went to them and said, "Look, we know you’re carrying some really heavy burdens, and we want to keep the workload commitments we made to you. When it gets too tough just give us the word. All we need to do is lower our standard one notch and we can hire some pretty decent people to help you out and bring the workloads down." Every time, our employees told us the same thing: "Don’t ever lower the standard, not even a little. We can take it. Keep looking for the right people."
That’s one of the reasons we have such a great staff today. It’s also why I think of those folks, many of whom are now in supervisory positions, as not just my employees but also my heroes.
But at the time, we were in a tight spot, caught between our need to staff up in a hurry and our commitment to maintain a high hiring standard and build a selective organization. I can tell you we managed to pull it off. How? For the answer to that question, tune into episode two of this series.
Here are part two and part three of this series.
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