Hiring choices

If you client experience is the most important element in construction marketing -- and for most of us, it is, because of the vital importance of repeat and referral business -- your front-line administration and reception employees are indeed among your most important marketing representatives.

So choosing who you hire for this work is vitally important, but never easy.

Of course, many more people "qualify" to be receptionists/administrators than competent sales representatives, designers, or tradespeople. The "entry level office position" is akin to the construction labourer -- yes, you need some important skills, but this isn't an area where you normally think of "labour shortage".

Indeed, with the recession still impacting the economy, a single posting on the Canadian government's free Internet job bank resulted in more than 100 resumes, within a couple of days.

We've developed some systems to manage the process.

First, everyone who sends a resume (unless they are obviously unqualified), is sent a questionnaire with math and grammatical puzzlers. The prospective employee is also asked whether all references from immediate previous supervisors can be verified, and if not, why.

Many don't bother completing the questionnaire. We had a laugh when one candidate sent an email with spelling and grammatical errors saying, effectively, "Why are you asking these questions -- they aren't necessary for the job." Well if you can't understand basic grammar and arithmetic, how are you going to add up the daily deposit, or send a client a letter reflecting well on the business?

We simply scan the questionnaires, and throw out all the applications who answer incorrectly.
Then we review the resumes for inconsistencies with the questionnaires. I only read the resumes AFTER the questionnaire -- we ask candidates to resend their resumes with the questionnaire responses so we don't have to fish through the big pile of initial inquiries.

Here is where things get trickier, however, and here is where I had a tough decision last night.

After a screening phone interview, we invite finalists in for a few hours of paid work. This is real work, reflecting operations, but varies day to day.

As its, I stopped reviewing resumes and sending out questionnaires after three days; we had three finalists in for work. The first candidate worked well through the day, but my "sixth sense" had real doubts. The second person showed up, looked at our messy offices, and told me that he doesn't think he would like working for us, and left. (Frankly, that rejection was painful.) The third person arrived yesterday but unfortunately I had to leave the office before the outgoing administrator and the prospective new employee could actually do any work.

At 4:30 p.m., my departing employee recommended the first candidate. But in my heart I sensed the third would be best. Nevertheless, I needed to make a decision.

I called the two candidates (rare evening phone calls) for final interviews and talked with a key employee who is staying. In the end, I decided to invite the first candidate in for a few days temporary work (she is available now) and possible on-call support later, but went with the third candidate, subject to reference verification.

What weighed my decision?

Recommendations from departing employees always carry much less weight than current and new employees
People leave an organization for a variety of reasons; maybe they have a much better offer, but maybe they simply don't fit into the culture. Their recommendations then carry the weight of their values. Sometimes they are angry and they want you to work with someone who will make things worse (I don't think that is the case here).

If I am wrong, what are the consequences?
We will have some business/operational disruption, but there is no shortage of administrative employees now. By offering the first candidate temporary work, I can fill some immediate needs and create a back-up should the second candidate not pan out. But a wrong decision here won't be a disaster.

Has the candidate met all the essential qualifications?
Bending the rules on references is never wise, equally hiring someone just because they look good or say the right things is dangerous. Here, I had a yellow flag as the outgoing employee said the person I thought best didn't understand some basic job-related requirements. But again I looked through the assessments, and concluded in my final interview that these problems would not weigh heavily on my decision.

What does my "gut" tell me?
Yes, intuition counts -- and when things are in doubt, can be the most important tie breaker.
Note that wise and selective hiring is never easy -- and you need systems to handle the process. I hope I have it right this time.

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Older workers, younger workers

Chase, delegated the challenging task of recruiting and screening potential sales employees for our business, has observed that many older candidates are reluctant to answer our questionnaires or complete the full pre-employment evaluation process.

Conversely, younger candidates, in their early to mid-20s, may complete the evaluations, score well, start out great, and then have a tendency to flame out much more rapidly than older employees.

Does this mean that either younger or older people should not work for us? No -- in fact they can be ideal employees, with enthusiasm, skill, and talent.

But what can we do to minimize hiring stress/waste and keep the younger or older employees engaged? This is a question all businesses must answer, of course.

Chase notes in his blog posting:

The process which I can not divulge in complete details is set up to allow people to demonstrate their true knowledge of what we do and produce measurable results.

The purpose is to weed out the candidates that are great fictional writers with resumes and find a truly great sales person.

I am finding that candidates under the age of 40 are happy to take up the challenge and demonstrate their skills. The other side of the coin is I am finding sales professionals over 40 take offence to our process and have heard the term "Jumping through hoops!" used several times.

How do I encourage these potentially great employees to play the game and take a leap of faith and do what they may think is below them? Most could probably pull out a Rolodex of business cards and demonstrate their ability to sell rather quickly, however like a fine wine they expect to be appreciated based on the vintage of their grapes or really in this case their experience.

The publisher and the owner of the company always ask the same question when these great candidates come along, "Why are they no longer there?" I am guessing in most cases performance slipped either based on the changes to environment or industry where they came from or more likely you can remove a higher ranking individual and with the savings in salary hire two people to replace them.

I posted the question to my publisher about how we could handle these candidates differently. I proposed he take them on and coax them to demonstrate their skills. I think there may be an opportunity for establishing rapport better based on the amount of grey hairs on their heads as well as overall career experience.

I answered Chase in my own publisher's viewpoint with these observations about older workers:

I don't have an easy answer to this question. I think the person who likely would be a great sales representative in our organization has extremely strong self-reliance and entrepreneurial characteristics. Most of the time, by the time people have reached middle age or older and have these traits, they have started their own business. If they are responding to an employment advertisement offering a salary, they either haven't succeeded, or perhaps crave much more security than a good salesperson should ever need.

This doesn't mean that we cannot modify our approaches but know of no better way to evaluate potential than to ask the potential sales representative to do some useful work before we offer permanent employment. Our lead/sales cycle isn't that long and someone who is motivated and understand the basics should be able to find results reasonably quickly. Since we pay for this work, we are not unfair to the potential employee. If they insist on job security before they truly prove their ability, I think they are putting the cart way before the horse.

For younger employees, I think the key is to make the connection between their real circumstances and passions, and allow for more intrinsic instability and self-discovery.

In one case, a young employee started out really well, then flamed out in a "firing" offence. After re-establishing communication with him, I confirmed that his problems at work had much to do with emotional confusion relating to his personal relationships. He has matured and discovered more clearly his entrepreneurial character.

So we discussed putting together a new working arrangement that will serve the business's interests, while allowing him to grow independently. (I'm a firm believer in allowing second chances for employees unless their failure relates to fundamental integrity weaknesses. Of course we don't go beyond this, to a third chance because if the problems repeat twice, you can virtually be certain they will not go away anytime soon.

So, hire young, hire old. You can respect the age differences without giving up your core standards.

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The bell curve: Incompetence and genius

Our company needs a new bookkeeper/accounting support person. This work, of course, involves specialized skills and experience, and much precision and attention to detail. The latter two qualities are not my strongest points.

Of course, we could go to a headhunter, or temp agency, or even our own general accountant and pay for someone to do the job. But I prefer to have a close and immediate working relationship with the person handling our books. So we advertised, using the Canadian government's free Job Bank service. (In Canada, the employment service is provided on a national, rather than the state level in the U.S.)

Within days, we had more than 120 resumes. How could we sort through all of these potential candidates and weed out the less-than-effective ones?

I decided to use some online resources. First, I found a free "competency test" from the American Institute of Professional Bookkeepers with a Google search. Since our business has some U.S. elements, our ideal candidate will know U.S. as well as Canadian accounting and bookkeeping rules (there are a few differences) and how to integrate accounting reports to produce consolidated financial statements. This is therefore not work for someone who has taken a two month basic bookkeeping course.

With test in hand, I loaded it on free publishing software provided by yudu.com (we are paying $200 per year extra for the enhanced version to allow us to edit pages and upload video files for the new Design and Construction Report.)

Then I took the email addresses from the people who applied, set up a Constant Contact list, and emailed everyone a brief job description, along with a request they complete the test, answer a brief questionnaire, and send in another copy of their resume.

By the deadline Thursday, we had about 40 responses.

Now the fun began. Before I even looked at the questionnaires, I started marking the multiple-choice tests tests using the answer keys provided by the association. Shockingly, most candidates got five or more questions wrong, some failed to answer half the questions on the multiple-choice test correctly. (Sheesh... this is an open book exam, unsupervised, and I invited the candidates to look up the answers if they weren't sure.)

We've now narrowed the list down to three names. They got one or at most two answers wrong. We'll interview the finalists, check references, and then set up a final interview with the company's general accountant who can lob real competency questions at the candidates. (This covers the remote possibility that someone would actually fake their way through the test and truly not know anything.)

But what about the more than 100 candidates who either decided not to complete the test, or completed it with many errors?

Of course, the explanation is that the really good and competent bookkeepers are currently employed, and employers are generally loathe to give up on great employees. In the current economy, many partially competent bookkeepers may also be looking for work, they can 'sort of' do the job, but really are not shining lights. A few good ones are around, of course; the challenge is to sift through the less-than-perfect ones to find someone who is truly right for the work.

Note we use a modified version of this hiring approach for all of our employees. Everyone who applies gets a chance; we only screen resumes after a prequalification test that indicates their fundamental competence and interest in the work.

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