This title says it all, “Who do you hire”? Possibly the title should have been, “Hire the right person for the job”! No one is perfect when it comes to hiring the right person, but a few of us did it fairly well.
One time during my working days, I was told to hire a certain person. The position was a supervisor (known as department managers today), the person was not good in that position and should not have been hired.
I was replacing a supervisor. I had narrowed the list down to two candidates. The HR person, at that time (Doug), came to Waco and interviewed both candidates. He did not like the candidate that I wanted, and he said, “I don’t think you will ever get him past Mike”! Mike was the president of the company. Instead of fighting for the one I thought was right. I gave in to the HR person. A big mistake!
The supervisors “I picked”, were good!
Hourly staff were our choice. By our choice, I mean my supervisors and me.
We were never told to hire a person from a particular race, sex, etc. We looked for people that we believed could do the job. I remember one year HR called and asked for a count of our staff by male, female, black, white, other minority, place of origin. We put the list together and sent it to HR.
I received a call saying, Waco had the best mix of staff, and that will help us with the reports. She went on to say that one of the centers had a problem (did not have a good mix). I was never told to hire a minority or a person from a particular group, we hired the best person for the job.
If you are the person who hires staff, hire the person that can do the job, not a person of a particular race, color, sex, education, etcetera.
Your company should be productive at whatever it is they do. When you hire the right people you will get the right results. By the way, this includes all new hires, hourly and salaried, even upper management!
When you make a mistake in hiring, terminate the mistake quickly!
My team and I learned this the hard way. All new hires had a 90 day probationary period. A few times we would have a staff member who was not meeting production standards as we neared the 90 day period. There were occasions when we decided to keep a person we should not have. Our logic was, we will work with them, we believe they can do the work and will be productive. Dumb and wrong!
When you keep someone past the probationary period, it is difficult to terminate them. You are then asked the question, if they were not at production during the probationary period, why did you keep them.
We learned, maybe you will not need to learn, if you take this to heart!
Don Ford
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