Go Early, Go Ugly

You are a success. Even with the tough economic times of the past several years your business is growing. You have dedicated nights and weekends to the business sacrificing your time and energy to the growth and development of your business. You have made it, for now. You understand that success is fleeting and you have to stay on top of your game and have people working for you who are on top of their game as well to keep your business in the position it’s in today. You know what it takes to make it.

Due to the growth of the business you need to hire a new Business Development Representative to add to the team. With the high unemployment rate this should be an easy job. You place an ad on one of the big job boards out there and the resumes start rolling in immediately. By the end of the second day you have 200 resumes in your in-box. This is going to be even easier than you thought! With all of these potential candidates to choose from you will be able to find a candidate to fill the position in no time! That is until you start going through the resumes.

The first twenty or so are not only not what you’re looking for in a candidate, they don’t even have any experience in Business Development. You keep looking and out of the first fifty you find three candidates that are even worth a look. You have spent all the time you can afford to looking at resumes. You call the candidates and reject one immediately over the phone. You decide to have the other two candidates come in for interviews. You set up Alice and Judy to come in on Thursday and Friday to meet with you.

Alice comes in on Thursday. Alice has a decent enough background in Business Development, but does not have a degree. You would really prefer someone with a degree, but you will consider her because of her background. Alice comes in wearing a low cut dress and sky-high heels. She can talk the talk, but there is no way your clients are going to respond well to her and take her seriously. If this is how she comes in dressed for an interview, what is she going to wear on the job? 

Judy comes in on Friday. Judy has a degree and has done some business development, so certainly looks like a better candidate. She is dressed professionally and has a personable and professional attitude. Things are looking up. You decide to give the job to Judy. She is not perfect, but you don’t have time to read 200 resumes and interview fifty candidates to find the right one. Judy will have to do.

Judy works for you for two weeks and her performance isn’t stellar, but maybe she just needs more time. After a month, Judy has failed to bring in any prospective clients. You decided to sit Judy down and talk to her about her performance. The excuses start rolling in. You hear about her troubles at her last job and about how she did not get the support she needed from the company to be successful. Oh, and there was the job before that where her boss was completely unreasonable in his expectations of her performance. In fact, you hear about everything except what she plans to do to improve her performance. This is not the “top of their game” employee you were looking for. It’s time to fire Judy and start again.

This happens all the time. Rainmakers are too busy running and growing their businesses to spend a large amount of time hiring for their business and will often use the “Go early, go ugly” approach to hiring. You know that your people are the key to the success of your business.  But, you are also the key to the success of your business and when you spend all of your time playing the role of HR Director, important work won’t get done. So, what do you do? You knowingly accept a less than perfect candidate because you don’t have time to do anything else. You go ugly to go early.

You need to bring in outside help, but typical staffing and recruiting agencies won’t cut it. They won’t spend any more time than you did to find the right candidate, and they don’t know your business like you do. Their results will typically be even worse than your own.

My People person can help. My People Person takes a personalized, high-quality, non-cookie cutter approach to selection and hiring that replaces not only self-directed hiring, but completely eliminates the need to use expensive and frustrating head-hunters and staffing agencies.

Starting with a Vision, Values and Culture meeting, I take the time to get to know you and your business. Then, through my Right Fit process, I use cutting edge selection tools and quantitative profiling to identify the best candidates for your business. I take the time to identify not just someone who’s good enough, but someone you would hire if you were able to devote all of your time to hiring the right candidate for your business.

Put an end to the “Go Early, Go Ugly” approach and call My People Person today to see how I can help.

Sincerely, 

Martha