Multi-Unit Franchisee Magazine Issue I, 2013 | Page 86

People
By Mel Kleiman

Hiring: Finding the
Best Employees
Does your system screen out the best—
and hire the rest?

W

hen it comes to recruiting and selecting new
hires, it’s amazing how
many astute business
owners and managers repeatedly shoot
themselves in the foot.
I’ve made hundreds of best practice hiring system presentations, and whenever I
ask if anyone in attendance has hired “the
employee from hell,” without fail, at least
20 percent of the audience will raise their
hands. (And those are just the ones brave
enough to admit it in public.)
Most of these hiring mistakes are the
result of two behavioral tendencies that
seem to be part of our all-too-human
nature: 1) resistance to change, and 2) an
inclination to take the easy way out.
When it comes to change, no one in
their right mind would deny it’s an entirely
different world today than it was even a
short 10 years ago. Yet, rather than change,
many employers stick with outmoded hiring
systems that might have worked well in the
past, but now actually screen out the best.
Make the job easy to apply for,
hard to get
Few recognize that in today’s economy almost all the people who want to work, are
working. The people who are employed
now are the dependable, honest, diligent
people you want to hire. So how do you
go about attracting them?
If you’re like most, you have some sort
of automated application process. And, for
those who pass muster, you expect them
to forfeit income and/or lie to their present employer to take time off to interview
with you at your convenience, Monday to
Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. In this scenario, a
person making $10 an hour would probably
have to take half a day off, so their weekly

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Multi-Unit Franchisee Is s ue I, 2013

Whenever I ask
if anyone has
hired
“the employee
from hell,”
at least
20 percent of
the audience
will raise their
hands.
paycheck would be $40 lighter and there’s
no certainty that you’ll offer them the job.
I read a story not long ago about a
customer service rep who was desperate
to find new employment because working
conditions where she was were deplorable.
When she was invited to interview, she went
out on a limb and asked her manager for a
half day off “to attend a funeral.” Then the
prospective employer called her to change
the interview to another day!
When it comes to salaried staff, another
sign of resistance to change is hanging on
to the requirement that the applicant submit a resumé. When was the last time you
updated your resumé? Five years ago? And
why should you? You’re not looking to go
anywhere else. No matter how enticing,
intriguing, and challenging the position
you have to offer is, not many busy working people are going to jump through this
time-consuming hoop just to apply.
You cannot hire anyone better than the

best person who applies, so make it easy
and simple for working people to apply
(through 24-hour job hotlines or online),
schedule interviews at their convenience,
and don’t have a lot of up-front paperwork
that discourages top talent. (Then be sure
to make the job hard to get with rigorous
pre-employment testing, interviews, reference, and background checks.)
Are your up-front requirements
necessary?
When you’re overwhelmed with applications, you must whittle the pile down
somehow. Not long ago, this was a manual
process. Today this is handled by automated screening programs, but they pose
some pitfalls as well. This is where many
tend to take the easy way out. We let the
computer analyze applications and resumés and send automatic “Thanks, but no
thanks” emails to those who don’t perfectly
match our requirements. It’s a great timesaver, but works in your favor only if the
requirements are really required to do the
job at hand.
Take the need for a college degree.
What kind of degree genuinely prepares
someone to be a customer service rep,
or for that matter, a manager or business
owner? If you have a degree, how much did
it contribute to your success to date? And
consider these famous folks who couldn’t
apply to work for you because they don’t
have degrees: Paul Allen, Wally “Famous”
Amos, Mary Kay Ash, Warren Buffet, Bill
Gates, and Steve Jobs, to name just a few.
Another common mistake is to screen
out the “overqualified.” The thinking is
that these people would soon become
uninterested or bored with a job beneath
their capabilities and leave for something
better as soon as possible.
When someone applies for a job for
which they are overqualified, it usually
means they’ve been looking for a long time
and are strongly motivated to find work
of any kind, hoping it will be a starting
point that leads to better things. People
who have a long, solid work history with
a pattern of increasing re sponsibility will
unfailingly bring the same qualities that
made them successful in the past to bear