Would your company have hired Young Mr. Lincoln???

Who is doing the hiring around here? the most powerful person in your company that’s who!

And it’s probably not you!!!!  This lesson really pertains more to small business that do not have a full time Professional Human Resource Manager.

Now let me get clear on this when I say do the hiring I should

What really just blows my mind is who’s doing
the hiring and this just amazes me that companies will let someone do the
hiring who is not trained, not qualified and frankly does not have the best
interest of the company at heart. We put people who are average performers in
charge of hiring people. So naturally they’re going to be more comfortable to
hire people who perform up to their own level or lower. It’s a natural thing
because people are intimidated and insecure. You’re going to have to find
somebody to do your hiring who is not afraid to hire someone who is actually a
better employee or higher achiever than they are themselves. Someone, who puts
the best interest of the company before their own, This problem will vary
between small employers like small businesses with maybe 30 or fewer employees
as opposed to companies that are large enough to have someone in a Human
Resource Management function. (Let me say here that does not mean you can give
your office manager the title and instantly they are qualified! Frankly that is
not wise, but that is your decision.) I cannot emphasize how severely dangerous
it is for a small company to trust the hiring to one person alone.

Now you can say we’ve got three or four people that
do the interviews! Well my question is do you have three or four people that
look at resumes and applications who score them, and  share feedback on these before you pronounce
them as worthy or not worthy. Because if you don’t then you are still
vulnerable to one person! Think of how many people would’ve never made it to
the top 10 on American Idol much less maybe won the contest if there was only
one judge and that judge was the sole responsibility for who got a chance.

I guarantee you if you were the owner of a small business
and you were to gather up all of the job applications and resumes in the
previous year for your company and just sat down and went through them you
would find people and say  to yourself why didn’t I get to see this
person, why didn’t we interview this other person? Or why didn’t I ever get to
know about that person? The answer basically will not be sufficient no matter
what they tell you. I cannot emphasize strong enough how critical this is. You
as a manager or a small business owner or a large business corporate officer
know from experience the impact a good employee can make over a bad one and how much damage a bad employee can do to your company I don’t have to teach you that. Yet we have these systems as we call them in place where you have a
gatekeeper who will turn away someone who has so much talent and ability
without even so much as taking a phone call from them.

Currently I live in a rural area that is mostly farmland
in the Deep South part of Illinois. I’m just 40 miles north of the Mason Dixon
line. It is predominantly agricultural and there is some manufacturing and
there’s a good bit of small business in our area. Fortunately we are located at
a good intersection on the interstate that is having a lot of growth. We even
just last year got our own minor-league baseball team. The local economy is
doing well and there are a lot of people who are moving home that are baby
boomers who have 20+ years experience out in the corporate world in the big
city. These are people who want to get home and spend time with their parents
before they end up in a nursing home many of them have taken early retirement
or been laid off and just said “what the hey, let’s go home!”. That’s exactly
what happened to my wife and I we were both corporate managers and her company
got bought out and mine was going out of business and we said “We’ve drug our
kids all over the Southeast for 20 years trying to achieve a career and look
where we are, let’s go home.

I attempted to help some other people find jobs that were moving back home and a prime example that I will never forget is a gentleman who had served in the
United States Navy and functioned as the chief financial officer at the
Bethesda Naval medical Center. He had already relocated to our area and
purchased a home and was trying to find employment. I knew the HR manager for a local company that owns a chain of hospitals and this was a young HR manager. I called her and described this gentleman’s experience to her and told her what all he had accomplished and variety of his work and offered to send a resume and she said “we don’t have any openings but at least he could apply for a job as a security guard.” If I could have reached through the phone I would’ve
slapped her. 

 They own about 6 hospitals in the  area, and each has an accounting function. I know of probably 10 to 15 people in my local area who have returned home from big corporate jobs elsewhere who have five times the experience of most people in management jobs at the local companies and yet they don’t get a second look because somebody is intimidated.

If you’re a business manager or an owner and you’re knowingly letting this go in your business then you deserve what you get. There are thousands of baby boomers moving home out
of the city who have years and years of experience who are willing to work for
lower wages than they made back in the city just to be able to have the
privilege to live at home with their folks and their family. But this
tremendous asset, this boon to the gross national product is squandered by
small minded insecure undeserving people who have been placed in authority
simply because of attrition. Enough people left that they finally got the job
and now they’re going to hang on to that for all their life whether you make
money or not. Let me point out this happens in the big city as well, any small
company can fall victim to this management by attrition handicap!

I have done some consulting work for a gentleman who
owns a daycare business and inherited control of it when his wife passed away.
He is a truck driver and is not experienced in the skills of managing the
day-to-day operations of a business but he’s been struggling for the last nine
years trying to keep it going. He feels a tremendous obligation to the
employees and the customers so he has sacrificed his personal income to keep it
going. He let a family member take over the reins and that person ran it into
the ground and he had to borrow money to keep it going. Then because he didn’t
know any better he promoted someone who’d been with them for 14 years and
unfortunately trained under the previous failed manager and let this person
take over the reins. 12 months later he is within weeks of losing everything he
owns in spite of having the business of appraised at about $900,000.

This is all because the hiring process was done based on
good old boy system( actually good old girl in this case, yes that happens
too!) and the famous “ I’m a good judge of character”, and just plain blind
trust. The good news is that this man was smart enough to realize he needed
help and it looks like we’re going to be able to save the business but at great
effort and with tremendous fast paced cultural change to the daily operation.

If you are a manager or a small business owner and
are letting one person be the controlling factor deciding who gets an interview
and who doesn’t you are risking everything on that person. If you are one of
these people I recommend you change your ways and create a system where you
look at all resumes or someone else that you trust that is not in a position to
be intimidated and has the good sense to know that interviewing a qualified
candidate is never a waste of time even if you don’t think you have an opening.
Just remember if they’re really that qualified and you don’t hire them they
will probably be working for your competition. In the situation where you get
someone extremely qualified and you don’t have an opening, keep up with them by
email or phone on a regular basis until you can use them. It will pay off to
have a good relationship with any person who is highly qualified in your
industry.

The key to this lesson is this; if an average
performer hires someone less average, and that person moves up to the hiring
position, they will hire even lower performers, and so on. Pretty soon the
performance level of your new hires will put you out of business.