From How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com by Eric Herrenkohl

Endorsed by Michael Gerber author of The E-Myth and The Most Successful Small Business in the World

First of all, put together an interview scorecard for the position for which you are hiring. It should outline what an A-player looks like for the position for which you are hiring. Your scorecard might have 5 criteria, it might have 13. These criteria could range from competencies like “Proven Leader” and “Proven Quality Control Abilities” to “Strong Sense of Urgency” and “Excellent Personal Customer Service Abilities.” When you get others in your organization involved in creating such a scorecard, you will be amazed at how much disagreement there is over the profile. If you all can’t agree on what an A-player looks like, your chances of hiring one are pretty small.

As part of this exercise, I like to customize an on-line personnel assessment that matches the scorecard. In addition to asking candidates interview questions, we can provide them with an on-line test that compares their results to the scorecard for the role. These test results help to reveal weaknesses in candidates that may not be immediately evident from interview questions. We usually test candidates after the first round of interviews but before the final interviews. That way, interviewers can focus on these potential weaknesses during their last round of interviews.

During the interview itself, have your scorecard and the candidate’s resume in hand and go job by job asking the person to:

• Tell me about your most meaningful accomplishments in this role.

• Ask plenty of follow up questions such as “tell me more” and “why so?” that dig beneath the surface and give job candidates enough rope to prove or hang themselves.

With this approach, you will have a pretty clear picture of what someone has accomplished and not accomplished during his or her career. How does this picture compare to your scorecard? If you need to know more to answer that question, now is the time to turn to more specific interview questions. For example, my clients often want to hire people who are leaders as well as experts in their specific areas. Your review of their accomplishments will have revealed some good information. If you need more, you can ask questions such as:

• Can you tell me by name the people you would say followed you in this role? If they worked for you, how were you a leader for these people vs. just being their manager? How did you influence them? If I called them and spoke to them, how would they say you impacted them? Are you still in touch with these people? Would they consider following you to this new job?

For some more ideas on favorite interview questions, Jay Goltz wrote a good column in the New York Times recently, you can check it out here http://nyti.ms/jaygoltzinterviewquestions

Here is another helpful hint: during the interview, write down quick notes in the candidate’s own words. If you do this, you will find that when you review your notes, these “quotes” will trigger your memory and help you recall what impressed you or turned you off about a candidate.

Finally, score each person on your scorecard. Then, compare notes with other interviewers (other people invariably will catch things we missed and vice versa). You will find that the combination of asking the right questions in an interview, and comparing what you hear to a scorecard for what you need, helps you to avoid hiring mistakes and make your interviewing process more “commercial grade.”

BTW, here is an article that outlines the new LinkedIn offering and its potential future impact on leading and keeping A-players http://bit.ly/cAE7Vd

One of the reasons that I wrote How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com is that I see too many business owners whose mindset remains “I have a position to fill,” rather than, “I have to find the next superior performer for my team.” It’s hard to stay committed to continually finding and hiring the best people. You have to invest more time up front in defining what you want (your A-Player Profile), you have to work harder to uncover more candidates (uncovering hidden pools of talent), and you have to interview more people. When you just look at these up-front costs, it can be hard to get excited about committing to hiring more A-players.

However, when you compare the payoffs of adding a superior performer to your team vs. an acceptable performer, the up-front costs of time and effort disappear in light of the return you will get on your investment. If you’re content to surround yourself with average people, keep hiring the same way you always have. But if you’re ready to take advantage of a buyers’ labor market and systematically surround yourself with talented performers who are also a pleasure to work with, then pay the cost now to find and hire your next A-player.

This is no way to run an interview.  If you are falling into some of these traps, then consider adding some or all of the steps below to reduce hiring mistakes:

1. Determine an A-Player Profile. In my new book How to Hire A-Players, I ask the question: would you know an A-player if you met one? How so? What would tell you that an individual you currently employee or that someone you are interviewing is an A-player? I know this sounds obvious, but you would be surprised at the lack of clarity within companies about the profile of an ideal candidate. If you don’t know exactly who you are looking for, you and your team will be slow to agree upon and actively pursue the right people.

2. Look for overall patterns of accomplishment. The best way to reduce hiring mistakes in an interview is to get a very clear picture of someone’s overall pattern of accomplishments in their life and career. Then, compare that pattern to your A-Player Profile for the role. Unlike mutual funds, with people past performance is the best indicator of future results.

3. Ask initial screening questions to weed out unqualified people. For example, some roles require that applicants have certain software expertise or industry experience. If you can’t determine this from the resume, ask about these abilities early in a phone screen. If someone does not meet these minimum criteria, they are eliminated and the phone interview is over.

4. Starting with their most recent role, confirm their dates of employment, including both the month and the year. People often fudge these dates – you want to verify them.

5. For each role, ask questions specifically designed to dig into their accomplishments. The best overall question to ask is: Please tell me briefly about the top accomplishments for which you were personally responsible while employed in this role?

6. Ask follow-up questions that keep the candidate talking. These questions include: How did you do that? Why so? Please tell me how you made that happen? What were the most important steps you took to make that happen? Such open-ended questions dig beneath a candidate’s initial, pre-planned answers and programmed responses to find out what he or she really did.

7. Take verbatim notes: I have found that jotting down the word-for-word responses that people provide during interviews is helpful. When you go back and look at your notes, those verbatim quotes will help you to recall the person’s strengths and weaknesses.

8. Score each candidate: Create a scorecard for yourself using the A-Player Profile that you created. Give candidate’s a score for each key area in the profile as well as an overall score. This helps you to objectively compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of all the people you interview.

In the end, it is your job as an interviewer to gain a complete picture of the accomplishments, failures, strengths and weaknesses of each person you interview.  Then, you compare that picture to your A-player profile for the job.  By taking this approach, you uncover more about job candidates than your typical interview and determine the person who best fits the role. The end result will be fewer hiring mistakes and more A-players hired.

Eric Herrenkohl is the author of How to Hire A-Players www.howtohireaplayers.com , being published by John Wiley & Sons April 12, 2010.

Peter Drucker wrote a classic article for the Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself.  In this Performance Principles, I relate how Dwight Eisenhower failed to manage himself effectively and went from being known as a brilliant person in press conferences to being a klutz.

The Payoff – we have to know ourselves and manage ourselves in order to be effective.  As Nathaniel Branden, who has written about 20 books on self esteem, has said – no one is coming to help us.  We have to take responsibility for managing ourselves if we expect to be successful.

People who get ahead take 100% responsibility for their own lives and careers.  This does not mean that you can win by yourself.  No man (or woman) is an island.  However, each one of us has to grow up and realize that life is difficult.  Business is filled with problems.  The people who get ahead think ahead, manage themselves well, play to their own strengths and (critically) manage their own weaknesses.

I recently talked to the president of a marketing business who told me that he wants to double the number of “homerun hitters” that he has in his organization. He wants people who can anticipate problems, see opportunities, and create solutions that serve customers. Another way of saying this is that the most valuable people in his business are those who know how to create solutions for customers and who can lead other employees to be a part of that process.

If you want to increase the number of strong leaders and performers in your company, here are two points to consider:

Every position has a combination of technical skills and behavioral skills required to qualify as an A-Player. What is the A-Player profile for key roles in your company? Don’t assume that people “will know an A-Player when they meet one.” They won’t. Or, worse, every person involved in the hiring process will have a different picture of what it means to be an A-player. Get everyone on the same page regarding this A-Player Profile so you can put on a big push to find and hire the best people.

In addition, not all employees are created equally. You should be investing your time with the A-players you already employ. Keep track of how much time you spend with your A players versus your problem children employees. Don’t spend too much time trying to solve problems for your average to poor performers while neglecting your best people. Your best employees don’t need their hands held. They do need you to provide them with the training and resources necessary to be successful. When you spend your time putting out fires for weaker performers, you do exactly that – spend your time. The only return you get is a resolved problem that should have been taken care of by someone else. However, when you invest your time with A-players, you give your best people the time and attention they need to do their jobs better. They take on even more responsibility and you fulfill one of your priorities – building an organization that has greater capacity to create value for customers and generate strong financial results in the process.

This retention rate would be impressive in any business, but the average turnover rate for “limited service restaurants” is 51%. In other words, a similar franchise owner is losing 50 employees every year while Dave Melton loses 1 or 2. How did he do it? Here are some points that I pulled out of this article that are relevant to any business when it comes to finding, hiring, leading, and keeping A-players.

He knows his A-player profile. In my upcoming book How to Hire A-Players, I talk about the importance of understanding the A-player profile for key roles in your business. You can tell Dave Melton understands his A-player profile. He says in this article that he looks for people who “can work quickly and have nice personalities.” My guess is that there are few other things he looks for as well, but don’t dismiss this basic profile. A lot of people have bubbly personalities but can’t get things done. Some people can get things done but are surly. He is looking for the combination.

Focuses on creating a great customer experience. Melton lists the bad behaviors that got some of his early, bad hires fired. They include “arguing with customers, refusing to wear uniforms in the correct way, visiting friends en route to delivering pizza, and failing to show up for work. What do all of these have in common? They all create a bad experience for customers. Let’s face it, the average retail experience in the United States is not impressive. If you can put a staff together that creates a good customer experience (much less an exceptional one), that is going to show up in your customer retention. It’s pretty easy to connect the dots between an exceptional retail staff and customer retention.

Creates an Internal Talent Incubator. You wouldn’t think that a Domino’s Pizza franchise could be a talent incubator, but read this article and you realize that Melton has accomplished it. He starts all his employees as hourly workers who make minimum wage + tips delivering pizzas by bicycle. But they can end up as Store Managers making $70,000 annually.

Shows People a Career Path. Again, you don’t associate the concept of Career Path with working at a place like Domino’s, but Melton realizes that you don’t have to send someone to Wharton to provide them with a career path. Melton and his wife Angie (who helps to run the franchise) encouraged one of their employees to take a New York City food safety certification course to “enhance her credentials.” The employee’s initial reaction? “I was a little skeptical. I don’t like tests. But I took it and I passed. I did well. I got a raise and I got a bonus for passing the test.” (She also got promoted to assistant manager).

Promotes Internally. Melton promotes from within when he has a job opening. When a company can promote good people from its ranks into leadership roles, you know they are doing a great job of hiring the right people, developing them, and keeping them around.

Taps into undervalued pools of talent. The article quotes Zia Shah, 35, a native of Pakistan with a degree in business who came to New York at age 26 looking for more opportunity. He started delivering pizzas for Mr. Melton’s Domino’s franchise and today is a manager of one of his 5 stores. Here is a very sharp, educated guy who was “overeducated” for his initial role but hung on because of the opportunity that was ahead of him. I am sure he was a lot hungrier for opportunity than many of his 26-year-old American peers. Sometimes finding and hiring A-players is like being a value investor in stocks. You have to find people who have been undervalued by the market and give them a chance.

Gets entry-level hires from employee referrals. Today, this Domino’s franchise gets most of its employees from employee referrals. I make the point in How to Hire A-Players that recruiting is just marketing and sales in different garb. We all know that positive word-of-mouth is critical in marketing and sales. The same thing is true in creating a team of A-players. If you hire great people and give them opportunities to succeed and win, they are going to tell their friends! Your job is to get your employees engaged in this A-Player mindset.

Grew his business organically. Melton grew his business from 3 stores to 5 in part because he already had groomed the talent to do so. Show me your business plan for growth over the next 3-5 years, and I will ask you if you are developing the talent today to fuel that growth.

You can find the New York Times article For a Franchise, Success is in the Hiring here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/jobs/06homefront.html?ex=1357275600&en=ce3f2f59f1063b24&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

This quote reminded me of the fact that the one thing you can’t outsource, synthesize, or fake is true passion. The biographer Robert Caro states that when Lyndon Johnson was Senate Majority Leader and had a new piece of legislation he wanted to push through, he would go into his office and repeat to himself – repeatedly and out loud – all the reasons why this legislation was the right thing to do. He would literally work himself into a passionate furor, and he did this so often that his staff had a name for it. Johnson is “winding himself up” again, they would say.

Johnson did this because he knew that it was impossible to sell something without believing in it completely and passionately. Music producers will tell you that in this digital age they can synthesize almost any musical element they want except for emotion. If artists can’t or won’t sing from the heart, and if they are unable or unwilling to connect with their audience emotionally through their music, no amount of post-production work can instill heart into a song.

Performance Principle: You can’t fake passion. You have to look at your work and your product and figure out how to get some passion for what you do every day. Good work alone is not enough to grow your customer base or expand your “following.” No one can or should care more about your work than you do. If you’re not passionate about what you do, how can you expect customers or others to commit their money and attention to your products or services?

Here are some questions to consider:

• Do your customers feel your passion for what you sell, or do they sense you are just going through the motions?
• Does your team know that you have a gut-level excitement for what you are doing?
• Do you have a vision for your work that goes beyond the day-to-day tasks that you complete every day?

Often, regaining passion for our work does not require changing what we do. Rather it means shifting how we view what we do. If you are in the insurance business, you don’t just sell insurance – you help people provide for the financial security of their families. If you are in the hotel business, you don’t just rent rooms – you help others get business done. If you are in the consulting business, you don’t just sell billable hours – you help people build great businesses. This kind of perspective helps you to regain your passion by viewing your current business through a new lens.

So, get away from the daily grind of work and think big and strategically about your business. You can schedule a weekend strategy retreat with your team. When I lead these sessions for clients, I often find that people emerge re-energized about their business. Or, maybe you just need to take that vacation you have been putting off. Finally, you can schedule a trip to New York City, hang out with some great people, and find some time to think – really think – about your business. It worked for me.