Choose your friends carefully

You can choose your friends but not your family. Recruiting people is rather like making friends, but they are joining your family.

Pick good ones, and they'll improve your life. Make bad moves, and they'll damage you and bring you down.

Who you work with is even more important than who you go to the pub to watch football with, as you will be spending a lot more time with your colleagues than your friends.

Here is a method one of my clients uses. It may not be how you would like to do it, but its does create some thought.

Recruiting is something they rarely do and they are intentionally small with just 22 people, but they have developed a method that has worked very well for them.

It allows us to find the right people and keep them happy.

In 10 years, they have only lost two people, and one has recently returned to them. So, what do they do?

First, they recruit late. They find people after it begins to hurt. They recruit to alleviate pain, not for pleasure.

They are brave as they are comfortable to skip over the perfect people if they don't have the perfect job for the person to do.

They believe that a lot of companies have in the past have invented positions for great people just so they didn’t get away. I had one or two clients in the construction industry that did this when they found a good engineer and when it the industry was at boiling point it was almost any engineer that could do the job.

They believe recruiting people when you don't have real work for them is insulting to them and hurtful to you.

Great people want to work on things that matter. Inevitably, a great person working on imaginary work will turn into an unsatisfied person. Then they will leave.

A smaller team keeps them focused. It crowds out all the things you'd like to do and replaces them with the things you have to do. It forces them to prioritise and focus on the next most important thing instead of the next "wouldn't it be good if…" thing. There are always plenty of those.

How do they know if they really need someone? Their rule of thumb is as follows but it may not suit every organisation:

Have you already tried to do the job yourself? If you haven't done the job, you don't really understand the job. Without that fundamental understanding, it's hard to judge what constitutes a job well done.

For example, a few years back, they decided it would be a good idea to recruit a business-development person, someone who could follow up on enquiries and other new business opportunities. Up to that point, they were not following up leads and email enquiries as they were just too busy doing other things.

They began interviewing people. Some were very qualified and had great references. But because they hadn't actually followed up on these new business opportunities before, it was hard to know exactly how to proceed with a candidate.

In the course of conducting job interviews, they quickly learned that because none of them had even tried to pursue business development requests, none of them could evaluate a candidate's skills appropriately.

Would the candidate be good at doing something they knew nothing about? How would they even know?

So after meeting with a variety of people, they stopped the search and began looking into these inquiries themselves. It quickly became obvious that most of the deals weren't worth pursuing anyway.

If they had not taken that extra step they may have hired someone to spend time on something they didn't even want! That situation was not good for the company or indeed the business development professionals career either.

They found great people because by thoroughly understanding the job.

They also behaved differently when vetting candidates, by ignoring CVs.

In their experience, they're full of exaggerations, half-truths, embellishments -- and even outright lies.

They are made of action verbs that don't really mean anything. Even when people aren't intentionally trying to deceive you, they often stretch the truth.

They also question what "five years' experience" mean anyway and suggest CVs reduce people to bullet points, and most people look pretty good as bullet points.

They did look in detail at the cover letters. They immediately tell you if someone wants this job or just any job.

Cover letters also tell you who can and who can't write. Spell checkers can spell, but they can't write. Wordsmiths rise to the top quickly. Another rule of thumb for them; when in doubt, always hire the better writer.

They look for effort, too. How badly does this person want the job?  (Pestering is not the same as effort)

During interviews, they love it when potential hires ask questions. But all questions aren't equal. A red flag goes up when someone asks how. "How do I do that?" "How can I find out this or that?"

You want people who ask why, not how. Why is good -- it's a sign of deep interest in a subject. It signals a healthy dose of curiosity. How is a sign that someone isn't used to figuring things out for themselves. How is a sign that this person is going to be a drain on others. Avoid “hows”.

They also try to test-drive people before hiring them full time. They give a one-week project to see how they approach the problem. They pay them for the week.

Sometimes, they will hire someone on a contract basis for a month to see how they feel about the person and how the person feels about them.

A project may just be few hours a week because the candidate already has a day job and it’s often enough to check out their work, how they communicate, and how they work under pressure. These work tests have saved them a few mismatched and confirmed some excellent appointments for my client.

The best are everywhere. It's up to you to find them.