Hiring and Firing (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

Brian Tracy

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780814437520
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

Hiring and firing are too crucial to get wrong. Eliminate the guesswork in the two most important tasks you face as a manager.

Hiring and firing are difficult to get right and potentially costly to get wrong, both for your career and for the business. Hiring & Firing is the indispensable guide you absolutely must have by your side.

Business expert Brian Tracy breaks down the simple but powerful strategies you can use to both bring stronger employees on board and weed out those not up to par. By learning to implement these techniques that Tracy can testify firsthand to the effectiveness of, you will make better leadership decisions that positively effect you and the business.

In Hiring & Firing, you will be able to:

• Write appealing and accurate job descriptions
• Use the law of three in interviews to find suitable candidates
• Ask the right questions
• Probe past performance
• Listen for the questions that indicate interviewees are qualified and serious
• Provide clear direction and regular feedback
• De-hire gracefully, and more!
• At best, hiring and firing are key to improving your team and reaching your goals.

Bringing on and letting go of the wrong people wastes company time and money while also reflecting poorly upon you. At worst, it could be crucial for the business in several ways. Hiring & Firing will ensure that you make the right decisions.

ONE

The Selection Process

THE SELECTION process is the key to your success as an executive and to the success of your company. The first law of management is selection. Ninety-five percent of the success of any enterprise is determined by the people chosen to work in the enterprise.

If you select in haste, you will repent at leisure. Most hasty hiring decisions lead to sorrow later. A hiring decision involves not only your life and your activities, but also the life, complexities, attitudes, personality, skills, and involvement of another human being. It involves people in areas that affects their lives as much as anything else, other than their families. When you have to hire, therefore, the best rule is to hire slowly and to select carefully.

Take Your Time

Hiring is an art. It cannot be hurried. It is like painting a portrait or preparing a gourmet meal. Occasionally you can do it quickly, but in most cases you have to take your time to be sure to make the right decision.

When you are in the position of hiring someone, it is common to make the mistake of hiring as a solution to a problem. You are overloaded with work. You have a hole, a job that needs to be done because somebody has quit or the company is expanding.

You therefore look upon hiring a person as a solution to this problem. You then go into the marketplace, grab someone, and throw that person at the problem. You hope that the new hire will somehow plug up the hole.

This is the worst of all approaches. Many entrepreneurs or people starting and running small and medium-size businesses make this mistake of looking at people as solutions to problems. This is absolutely the wrong attitude and approach to the business of hiring.

Poor Selection Is Expensive

Poor selection is very expensive. Don’t ever think that if it doesn’t work out, you will just fire the person and get someone else. This is the attitude of a manager who is inexperienced or incompetent and who should not be in the position of hiring people in the first place.

Hiring is expensive for three reasons. Number one is that you lose your time—the time that it takes you to go through the selection process, prepare, interview, hire, and train the new individual.

Second, you lose the amount of money that you spent in salaries or wages, benefits, and training on your new hire, because everything learned is lost to the company when the person is fired and departs.

The third thing you lose is that individual’s productivity, plus the productivity in between the firing and when the next person comes on board.

In addition, firing is expensive in terms of morale. In any company where a lot of firing goes on and there is high turnover of staff, you invariably have low morale, low performance, and low productivity because everybody is continually wondering if they are going to be next.

According to the personnel experts, it costs between three and six times the individual’s annual salary to hire someone and then lose them when they don’t work out. These are just the actual financial costs. This is why companies that have high rates of turnover are almost invariably low profit companies. The companies that are the most profitable have turnover rates that are as low as 1 percent or 2 percent per year.

Even if you are in a hurry to find the right person and get someone into that job, practice what Shakespeare said: “Make haste slowly.”

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Think of the best hire you ever made. Who was it and how did you go about making your decision?

2. Think about the worst hire you ever made. What mistakes did you make? What did you learn?

TWO

Think Through the Job

THOMAS J. WATSON, founder of IBM, had signs throughout the IBM offices, on every wall, with the single word “THINK!” Each person in the company was encouraged to look at those signs continually whenever making decisions or solving problems.

This lesson applies to hiring as well. Nothing could be more important than your ability to think through the job in the first place. Think through the actual requirements of the job. What will the person have to do, day in and day out? What specific results do you expect this person to achieve?

Stop and Think

When you decide to hire a new person, step back mentally and pause for a while. Don’t fall into the trap of automatically hiring people who are just like the people they are replacing. Take the time to analyze the current responsibilities of the position, as if you were starting anew.

Imagine a factory. A factory has three processes. The first is the inputs: the money, time, resources, raw materials, management, and so on that the company needs to operate.

The second process is the activities that the factory engages in to produce the products that are to be sold in the marketplace. In the factory, production activities take place and, as a result, outputs occur.

The third process is the production of specific outputs that can be used by others and combined with other work or activities to create a product or service that can be sold in the marketplace.

Each Person as a Factory

Think of each individual as a factory as well. The individual has inputs—the knowledge, skills, talents, background, and experiences that individual brings to the job. While working, the individual performs a series of functions, tasks, and activities that constitute the real work of the employee.

Finally, the employee is expected to produce specific, measurable outputs, the accomplishment of which will determine the employee’s success at the job.

When thinking through the job, ask yourself, “Exactly what specific, measurable outputs do I want from this new person, and what skills will this person need in order to accomplish these required outputs?”

Update Your Thinking

In times of turbulence and rapid change such as today, and for the indefinite future, the position you are hiring for now will probably require new or different skills from those you have needed before, or from those that a previous employee was hired for. Very often, the job has changed and evolved over time. What you might need is not a replacement for a departing employee but a completely different person altogether.

What qualities does the person need to have to perform the job and get the desired results? You don’t need a superman or superwoman for a job that requires only average competence and intelligence and which leads to the production of ordinary products and services. You do not need a superstar to do an average job that is not particularly challenging or demanding.

On the other hand, if you have an extremely challenging and demanding job, you will need to hire a very skilled person. Be realistic with regard to the qualities and skills you require to do this particular job because you’re going to have to pay for them.

Is the Job Doable?

In thinking through the job, Peter Drucker suggests that you ask, “Is the job doable?” In other words, is the job that you are trying to hire for a job that can be done by one normal person?

Very often, jobs cannot be done by a single person. They are too complex, or they require conflicting skill sets or temperaments. The job you are designing may require that a person do two different things that conflict, or the job may just be too big for one person.

Some years ago, I initiated the importation and distribution of a line of Japanese vehicles into the country. In the first year, we set up sixty-four dealerships to sell and service these vehicles. This required a super salesman, which we had. But we also insisted that he work with the finance department, parts department, services department, and sales department of each new dealership, and complete large amounts of paperwork that were essential to the smooth functioning of the sale of our cars through these dealerships.

Divide the Tasks

The sales executive we had was excellent at convincing dealers to carry our line of automobiles. But he was terrible with paperwork. This became a bone of continuous contention. We were always frustrated and arguing over delays and incomplete documents that other people in our distribution network required in order to do their jobs properly.

I finally had a revelation. Great salespeople are not necessarily great with paperwork or details. But our service manager loved to do detail work. His temperament was exactly suited for filling out every line and blank in our application forms for vehicles, parts, service, and financing.

Our solution was to focus our top salesman on building relationships and opening up new dealerships—the key to our financial success. After the dealership had been appointed, our service manager would go in to make sure that all the paperwork was completed in a timely and accurate fashion. Result? No more problems.

Make sure that the job you are hiring for can be done by a single person. Be prepared to change the description of the job on a regular basis as you get more experience and more information about the job and what actually needs to be done.

ACTION EXERCISES

1. Think about a job that needs to done or a position that needs to be filled in your company. Exactly what results will be expected of the person in that job?

2. Identify the three most important skills and the past experiences that a person will need to do this job in an excellent fashion.

THREE

Writing the Job Description

THERE IS A saying in business: “Before you do anything, you have to do something else first.” Before you even think of hiring someone, you have to write out the job description in detail.

Clarity is your best friend. The more clarity you have with regard to exactly the person you want to hire, the easier it will be for you to make an excellent decision later.

Think on paper. Start creating your job description by standing back and thinking through what the individual will be doing from the time work starts in the morning until finishing time in the evening.

List every task, function, and responsibility that the new person will have. Write it out like a checklist, as if you were describing the job to the kind of person you expect to do it, step by step. This really forces you to think about the job with much greater clarity. This task takes work, which is why most people don’t do it. But because they are unclear about exactly what the new person will be expected to do, many managers make mistake after mistake, hiring the wrong person again and again.

Make a List

Once you have written out your list, go through the items and set priorities for each. This is quite simple. Next to each of the items on your list you write “very important,” “important,” and “not so important.”

If you like, you can list them as 1, 2, or 3 in importance. Or you can use the ABC method of prioritizing the work functions, with “A” being very important, “B” being important, and “C” being not so important. You can then organize them further as A-1, A-2, and A-3 tasks or responsibilities.

You must be especially clear about what is “very important,” because these are the tasks that you must be sure that the candidate can do in an excellent fashion during your interview process.

Another way that you can organize your list to achieve better clarity for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Selection Process
• 2. Think Through the Job
• 3. Writing the Job Description
• 4. Finding Suitable Candidates
• 5. The Interviewing Process
• 6. Use the Law of Three
• 7. Past Performance as the Best Predictor
• 8. Checking Resumes and References
• 9. The Family Member Method
• 10. The Best Predictor of Success
• 11. How to Negotiate the Salary
• 12. Start Them Off Right
• 13. Start Them Strong
• 14. Use the Correct Leadership Style
• 15. Improve Performance Continually
• 16. Address Performance Problems
• 17. The Two Main Reasons for Employee Failure
• 18. Zero-Based Thinking
• 19. When Firing Becomes Inevitable
• 20. The Firing Interview
• 21. The Zen of Firing
• Index
• About the Author