Management Minefields

In the first of a three-part mini-series on people management issues, Angela Atkins explores how business owners can hire the right person for both team fit and skills.

Recruiting the right person is always important but when you’re an SME (small or medium enterprise) owner, a new person can completely change the whole culture of your company, so suddenly it becomes incredibly important!
There are a number of minefields that can blow up in your face so here are the factors and some ways to avoid the explosions! For each I’ve outlined what you need to consider and some real examples of what we’ve experienced can happen.

Personality style
Different personality types often suit different job types. Someone who is analytical and enjoys data can be better suited to a detailed role (e.g. accounting, IT), whereas someone who is creative and big picture might suit a sales role. However, you need to be careful not to box someone if you do talk about their preferred style or just recruit the same type of person as you.
REAL STORY: A marketing manager we worked with was creative and outgoing and decided she wanted all her team to be the same, as they needed to come up with new ideas. However the role she was recruiting needed to check all the marketing content – grammar, spelling, product details – and therefore actually needed to be detailed focused.

Team fit
As well as thinking about personality, you should also consider how well the person will fit with the team, especially if it’s a small team. Some people just don’t get on with each other but often once we’ve employed them it’s too late!
REAL STORY: In a finance company, the GM invited the preferred candidate in to have morning tea with the team. The candidate actually got into an argument with the others and it was clear his opinions would cause real issues with the rest of the team. He wasn’t hired.

Attitude
With attitude, when you interview, ask candidates about what they know about the company and why they’re interested in the role. If they seem keen and enthusiastic you can always train them if they haven’t got all the skills you need. But if they just seem to want any job, you’re going to expend lots of energy on them.
REAL STORY: In retail we had a candidate who was very experienced but firmly believed selling should be done behind the counter. The manager spent months training her to go out on the shop floor but her attitude was too hard to change.

Experience
Here you need to consider what type of background experience they MUST have, and what would be NICE to have. Try and think outside the box about other experience that might be useful for them to have that could give them transferable skills.
REAL STORY: A call centre manager was focused on hiring only people who had at least two years in a call centre already. However, when we looked at the most successful and longest staying employees, they actually had experience in retail or hospitality but NOT call centres. The call centre experience actually meant they had pre-existing ideas about the job, whereas people with experience in dealing with customers worked out much better!

Skills
Now it starts to get really hard. What are the actual skills you require? In the call centre example above, what the candidates actually needed were customer service skills, the ability to learn how to use the phone system and problem solving skills if a customer had an issue that needed to be resolved. Once you’ve worked that out, you can ask interview questions about those actual skills. In the recruitment chapter in my book Management Bites I have suggested questions for lots of different skills – or if you’re stuck talk to your HR consultant or even Google what questions people suggest!
REAL STORY: When we recruited sales assistants I would ask them things like ‘Can you tell me about when you had a difficult customer. What did you do?’ ‘Talk me through when you had a problem in your life or at work. How did you go about solving it?’ Seeing what they did in a similar situation gives you the best prediction of how they’d deal with it in your job.

The law
When you recruit you need to make sure that you don’t ask information that could be discriminatory under the Human Rights Act. You also need to follow the principles in the Privacy Act for collecting and storing personal information about candidates. I have more tips on this in Management Bites. If you’re unsure it’s a good idea to talk to someone who has recruited before, or check out the Department of Labour website.

Biases
Last but not least, do be aware of your biases when you’re recruiting. Choosing someone similar to you might not be best for the role you’re hiring for. You also need to be careful about candidates who aren’t that good in the interview – they may still be excellent in the job.
REAL STORY: We interviewed someone who was really nervous in the interview but had some good examples after she warmed up. Both of us interviewing had had the ‘horns’ bias – because she’d started badly we’d rated her less than other people. So we brought her in for an hour to do an on-the-job test and she was brilliant!

So there in a nutshell is some really quick examples of the minefields that can happen and some tips and techniques to overcome them! Next time I look at reviewing performance and providing feedback. Explosions ahoy!