I have been hiring people for almost three decades. I started Design Extensions when I was 17. I worked alone for a long stretch, then ran with project-based contractors, then hired my first real full-time team member, and have been adding and subtracting people ever since.
If I had to summarize what I have learned in three decades down to a single sentence, it would be this. Most owners hire for skills and fire for values. The fix is to do the opposite.
Hire for values and skills, with values weighted higher. Fire for performance against a clear and written standard. And do the work upfront to know what those values look like in a Tuesday-morning interview, not just on a poster in your conference room.
This is not a soft topic. This is the topic. Get this wrong and the rest of your strategy does not matter. Get it right and even mediocre strategy survives.
Position list before the people list
Before you ever post a job, you have to know what position you are filling. Not the title. The actual position.
In a sport, the positions are obvious. A football team has a quarterback, a center, a wide receiver. The skill sets for those positions are entirely different. Nobody walks onto the field and says, "I have a great athlete, I will figure out where to put him." You start with the position and then you find the athlete who fits it.
In business we do this backward. We get busy, panic, post a job that is really just a list of tasks we are tired of doing, and hire whoever seemed nice in the interview. Then we spend 18 months trying to make a position fit around a person.
The exercise that fixes this is dull and worth its weight in gold. Make a list of every single thing it takes to run your company. Vision. Sales. Operations. Client work. Bookkeeping. Trash. Then group tasks into categories, and categories into positions.
Now you can ask, position by position, who is currently doing this and is that the right person. You will be surprised how often the answer is "nobody is actually doing this" or "I am still doing this even though I told myself I delegated it three years ago."
Hire slowly. Slower than that.
Dave Ramsey says something like, "Take however long you were going to take to hire someone, and multiply that by four." Rushing is the single most expensive thing you can do in hiring.
What we have moved to is a process where multiple team members do interviews, not just me. The first conversation is a thirty-minute drive-by to get a read on personality and look for early red flags. Then I bring in two or three teammates who will actually work with this person. They do their own interviews. The candidate makes it to me last.
Two things happen. The team has real ownership over who joins. And you catch mismatches early that you would have missed alone.
The red flags are usually not subtle. The candidate's first question is about pay and benefits. They cannot tell you anything about your company. They give you the same polished answer to every question. Their stories of their previous job all paint someone else as the villain. Slow down on every one of those. Slowing down costs a few weeks. Hiring the wrong person costs a year and the morale of the team you already have.
Hire for values, then skills
warning Red flags in interviews are rarely subtle. First question is about pay and benefits. They cannot tell you anything about your company. Every story paints someone else as the villain. Slow down on every one of those. :::
What is the one behavior that gets a red card on your team, and have you put it in writing yet?
