Who should I hire

Easy question, easy answer: The best possible candidate. No, seriously. We covered in the previous post the fact hiring is a large cash investment for a company and you should justify this cost with someone multiplying the output of the team. The only type of those people are the best people.

The best

There is an anecdote that Steve Jobs said: “A players hire A players, but B players hire C players and C players hire D players. It doesn’t take long to get to Z players. The trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.”

I agree with the concept but hate the idea of putting people into boxes. People are not items you put in a box, and someone considered A player for company 1 might be a Z player for what company 2 needs.

So you need to hire the best candidate for what you need now.

Start early

If you hire talented people at the early stages of their career you can shape and influence them quite a lot. I wrote about this in my first post on this blog here. You can pay less, since they lack experience, but you should only hire early professionals if you can afford it now and they are showing signs they are going to become the best quickly.

In addition, hiring early professionals gives your more experienced people an opportunity to mentor and train other people, an extremely valuable skill.

Wait, if you need

If you didn’t find the person you are looking for don’t compromise on an “OK” person. This point is crucial, either your job description isn’t nailed out, or your position is not well defined, or your hiring process lacks. I will try to cover the hiring process next week, but before we get there, it is an absolute must to understand and accept the fact compromising is going to hurt you and cost the company much more in the long run.

Do your homework find out what is the cost of not hiring, and find out what is broken and fix it. Avoiding the root cause of failure to hire is not going to help you, and bypassing the issue by compromising is foolish.

That is it for this week. Next week - How should you hire. I am enjoying this series, I hope you do as well.