How I make my best hires ever

The greatest costs and worry in business to management is manpower.

They need work to feed their families, they build your company and they grow emotional attachment to you and the company. It is never great to lose them via them leaving or you firing them, as it hurts everyone in the company.

Here are my ways that I have found the best hires ever with no regrets. In the process, I have also saved lots of money from the attrition or replacement process!

1) Ask for a task to be done

• Put simply, ask candidates to perform a task with a deadline. This could mean read up on our website, our publications, write a summary on a problem we are facing and your approach - set a deadline on that.

The candidates who are the ones who do the tasks, finish within deadline and inform you usually show signs of accountability. This represents their ability to execute on tasks with a timeline and check in with urgency to make sure it is acknowledged.

If candidates are not keen, do the tasks half-heartedly or miss the deadlines, it has always been the case that the individual is not interested enough in the role or might have other thoughts when hired and given tasks to perform specifically to a deadline.

2) Take references from the managers with bad feedback

• In other words, candidates like to give 3 references of people who expectedly sing praises and might not give much insight to what you seek. Instead, you should ask the candidates respectfully who was the worse manager they have ever worked for and reference from there or colleagues in that department, the insights will be fruitful if taken well

This will be a tough ask to candidates but assure them it is only to make working with them better and more enjoyable mutually. You should ask if they would share a manager they did not like, had a poor relationship and if you may have the opportunity to speak with them. The candidates who have a clear conscience and integrity would often agree and give this information readily.

The candidates who hesitate, reject the request aggressively or look elsewhere immediately for an opportunity might show signs that they might not be proud of the work or actions they did prior or post the bad relationship with their manager. Whilst not always easy to judge, it might show signs of stress tolerance, conflict resolution and the ability to separate objective work tasks vs emotional employee relationships.

3) Social Media Scan

• Whilst Social Media should be respected and kept private from work life, it is increasingly clear that most companies check candidates on their social media presence. You should respectfully ask for their social media handles, especially if the role requires leadership, tenacity or any values required for a job role to be executed well.

This might sound intrusive but it has helped me weed out many wrong hires and also alarmed me of many bad hires as well, that I have personally made mistakes on. If candidates have a social media handle that constantly shows late night out drunk photographs, flirting with the opposite sex, violent images of vulgarities and constant complaints of anything under the sun, there might be a serious issue. You might be hiring a whiner or snowflake, who loves to enjoy life and might at anytime throw you or the company under the bus socially.

If candidates have plenty of pictures or content of them working on their passions such as coding, and it shows through their Github repositories and Youtube efforts for the software engineer role you are offering, you might have found the 1%. The 1% are the ones who truly seek to grow in their interest areas and are good due to the 10,000 hours they can commit to honing their craft, instead of seeing it as just a way to pay their bills.

4) Contract to Permanent

• Microsoft, Google, Apple and some large hedge funds have perfected this strategy. They often offer a contract of limited tenure with the potential for conversion upon performance. Whilst this might deter candidates who seek stability and a means to pay the bills comfortably, it could identify with candidates who are confident enough in their ability and work ethics to take a risk to join your company for the long haul. Especially in startups and growth stage companies, I have had success myself hiring candidates on a 3 months/6 months/ 12 months contract so that the company mitigates the costs of the hire ( base salary x number of months) and the candidate is given the expectation that if it does not work out, they do not have to drag their feet to work while trying to find their next career habitat.

I have found that candidates who are willing to take risks and contracts to perform a project deliverable, often are more self-driven and accountable to their abilities. They often question what can they do better and improve, instead of blaming the lack of resources, management help, benefits for any failures.

You might find candidates who you doubted because of your biases on their hard-skills( no degree, no industry training, not from target market segments) who prove you wrong, by offering such a creative arrangements. Microsoft and Google are able to keep the most suitable employees while naturally allowing the lesser suited employees leave through this strategy and it will definitely suit any start ups or entrepreneurs focused on the fear of manpower investments.

5) Break all rules you have set for hiring once in awhile!

• If you have a very good gut feeling about someone you just cannot explain, sometimes its worth taking that shot. Much like the ideal partner you imagined you would have in marriage(tall, beautiful, smart) and the ideal partner(short, funny, full of energy) you eventually end up with, gut feelings and chemistry are highly critical to a successful working relationship.

I have found that candidates with great soft-skills, no degree, no overseas experience, no big company brands actually come through with great success. Great soft-skills such as giving effort before asking to be rewarded, being humble even with some successes in their lives and the ability to figure out a hurdle( depression, obesity, disability) and owning it to become a motivation and "superpower".

Sometimes, breaking all the rules because someone has all the characteristics of a great individual is everything that person needs. Someone who deservingly gets a chance will outwork and outdo through all means ethically, someone who has a great life of ease, Ivy league background and an immediate 6 figure salary upon graduation almost every time.

These are some of my suggestions to supercharge your hiring process to hire the best of the best! Yes, there will be challenges to time to fill, negotiations and push back from your hiring panel who might try to go for safer hiring mechanisms, but NEW is not wrong, NEW is just uncommon. Seeking the Uncommon amongst the Common will be your game changer if you dare to try!

AT Asia Pte Ltd

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