Alan Cohen

"Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration." - Thomas A. Edison

Hiring people is the absolutely most important thing that an organization does. Great people make for great companies. Great people do whatever is needed to achieve success. Everything else is really only a detail.

There are actually three steps to ensuring that a company is composed of excellent people:

Use a hiring process that tends to find the best people, and tends to weed out duds.

Maintain an environment where the flowers thrive, and the weeds perish.

Remove people from the payroll who are going to hurt the success of the company.

The hiring process cannot ensure success, but it can almost absolutely ensure failure. One never knows for certain how an employee will work out until they actually have been an employee for some time. However, the hiring process is where we take our best shot at attracting winners. If we attract a few bad fits in the process, we can move them out down the line. But, if we fail to attract the best during the hiring process, then all is lost.

There are no guaranteed sure-fire ways to hire great people, but there are various tactics that tend to help.

You Can’t Cheat Statistics

Let’s suppose that you want to hire folks that are among the top 5% of talent in their field. This means that if you started with a random pool of 20 candidates, and picked the very best one, you’d probably meet your goal.

Disturbingly, many of us start with pools of, say, 4 or 5 people. In the event that we pick perfectly from among this pool, we’ll only, on average, end up with a top 20% candidate -- if we assume that the pool of candidates accurately represents the pool of talent available. However, the folks looking for jobs are not necessarily an accurate reflection of the folks in a field. The field is skewed, to some degree, to have an overabundance of good and bad candidates.

That the pool has an overabundance of very bad candidates is fairly obvious – bad candidates cannot easily find jobs, and tend to lose them, so they tend to spend a disproportionate amount of time looking for work, and thus a disproportionate number of their resumes will appear on your desk.

Good people are also overabundent, for at least two reasons:

1. Good people are doers. They actively seek better situations.
2. Good people have an attitude - they are not wimps. Many organizations are more interested in harmony and hierarchy than in demanding excellence - and thus many good folks end up either without jobs, or being harmed in their careers, because they demand excellence.

The bottom line: if you want the best, there is no substitute for screening and interviewing a lot of people. I'll typically look through hundreds of resumes at the start of the search for a hire. That turns into 10 or more phone screens, and three to five interview sessions.