Winning - Jack Welch [32]
Although I didn’t think of it at the time, most of these people had no future beyond the jobs I had just put them in. Our business was growing rapidly, and they didn’t have the skills to grow with it. In fact, by the time the business was four years old, all of them were gone and we were filling the positions again.
With my first shot at hiring managers, I didn’t know any better. I just wanted to get the job done. But I eventually learned that it pays to go for the high-potentials who can grow with the business or are capable of moving up elsewhere in the organization. Hiring a highly skilled “blocker”—someone who will hit the ground running but has no future beyond the open position—is tempting because it solves an immediate need. But blockers soon become enervating. They get bored by the familiarity of the work or, as in my early case, swamped by its challenges. Their people get discouraged because they see their bosses going nowhere, which makes them wonder about their own opportunities.
A good rule of thumb, then, is not to hire someone into the last job of his or her career, unless it’s to be head of a function or CEO.
6. How long does it take to know if you’ve hired right? Usually within a year—and certainly within two—it is pretty clear if someone is getting the results you’d hoped for.*
It’s relatively easy to notice when a person lacks the energy and execution you anticipated. But the ability to energize and the capacity for edge sometimes take longer to show up in a new environment. People want to fit in before they start rousing the team to a cause or making the tough calls. But as I said, within two years at the most, if an employee is still falling short of your expectations, it is time to admit your mistake and start the process of moving the person out. If you have been doing your job and giving honest evaluations along the way, the employee shouldn’t be surprised, and an equitable severance package will likewise soften the blow.
Hiring right is hard. I’d say as a young manager, I picked the right people about 50 percent of the time. Thirty years later, I had improved to about 80 percent.
My point is: don’t beat yourself up if you get hiring wrong some of the time, especially when you’re starting out.
Situations change. People change. You change.
But just remember, every hiring mistake is yours. You have to fix it, not an HR person you call in to do your dirty work. Take responsibility and make sure the ending is candid and fair.
And now for our San Diego question.
What is the one thing you should ask in an interview to help you decide whom to hire? If I had just one area to probe in an interview, it would be about why the candidate left his previous job, and the one before that.
Was it the environment? Was it the boss? Was it the team? What exactly made you leave? There is so much information in those answers. Keep digging and dig deep. Maybe the candidate just expects too much from a job or a company—he wants a boss who is entirely hands-off or teammates who always agree. Maybe he wants too much reward too fast. Or maybe she’s leaving her last job because she has just what you want: too much energy to be held back, so much ability to energize she wants to manage more people, too much edge for a namby-pamby employer, and such a strong ability to execute she needs more challenge.
The key is: Listen closely. Get in the candidate’s skin. Why a person has left a job or jobs tells you more about them than almost any other piece of data.
Your goal in hiring is to get the right players on the field.
Luckily, great people are everywhere. You just have to know how to pick them.
It’s so easy to just hire people you like. After all, you’ll be spending the majority of your waking hours