I know it sounds like a dumb mistake now, but when you’re insanely focused on winning more business, it’s easy to forget about how you are going to deliver it. We had landed so much work that we just couldn’t handle it anymore. We could outsource some of the heavy stuff, but that wasn’t sustainable. So, with very little time to prepare and on the back foot, we had to recruit, but we did have a fit-for-purpose, fast-growth recruitment process.
This meant that the recruitment process was rushed, and we were terrible at filtering applicants. And that meant we hired people who just weren’t right for the job. I can’t tell you how damaging that was to our business. When I did hire staff well, we were all so busy that I didn’t do a good enough job of properly managing them. One guy was waiting on a performance review and probably a pay rise in hindsight, and I was too busy running the business to remember. He was good enough to give me a couple of month’s grace before he started looking elsewhere. He finally found something and handed his notice in. I’ll never forget walking into work that morning and seeing a handwritten envelope on my desk. I knew right away what it was, and I fought hard to keep him, but he had already mentally moved on. Sound familiar?
One of the secrets of the best leaders I’ve met is the significance they place on employee selection. If you hire the wrong people, all the best management techniques in the world won’t bail you out.
You can’t achieve consistent results until you get the right people in place. Trying to fix people problems after someone is recruited is, at best, a poor use of time and talent and, at worst, full of costly consequences and a drain on valuable resources. Hiring is a front-end loaded situation—not a backend issue to deal with later.
The bottom line is that you need to leverage success by avoiding the pitfalls of poor recruitment decisions and focusing on selecting the best and brightest from the available applicant pool.