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Find Honest Collaborators

Guest post by: Herb Gilliland

Article Overview: How to avoid wasting your time with the hiring process: looking for a job, or hiring for one. Building a team is very important, and finding people who identify with you and produce is key.

Find Honest Collaborators

Seeing things from both sides - as an entrepreneur and business owner and as a job-seeker - I've formed some opinions over the years about the hiring process. Building a team: Find people who you can relate to, who are as good as you if not better at the required skills, and who see it as a long term commitment (perhaps even longer than their marriage in this day and age). Core teams have to work closely for many years to build successful businesses together, so finding people who give you 100% -- even if they don't make 100% -- are mature relationships. Don't try to train people to be what you want, instead find people who are what you need. Hopefully you'll relate, and it will be a win-win. The greatest collaborations happen between friends, so look for someone who you want to be your new work friend, not the corporate politician or the wishy-washy hedger who can't make decisions and is non-specific. Here is my take on the weaknesses of organizations that fail to see the bigger picture: Resistance to change or guidance. "Guidance" means "common sense" or "the logical, scientific approach" -- this means you should avoid organizations that won't listen to an expert. They were looking to hire one, right? Well, they should take your advice, not ignore it. That doesn't mean they have to act on it, but they should at least permit it to be part of the dialog. Ignorance of your opinion is usually a sign of stagnant corporate culture and probably means a lot of political games. If you find yourself not saying the "right thing" (the correct answer, even to simple issues) then you are not really doing a good job. You may be rewarded for it, but that emptiness will grow and grow until you absolutely hate your job and find a dead end. If a manager or even the human resources person can't take advice, then they are speaking from an arrogant position of false authority. American business is riddled with catch phrases. Corporate cultures like this probably don't need a creative person such as yourself, and so they will never use you to your fullest potential. For this reason, you won't grow in your position and probably won't be promoted unless you play politics. Don't bother playing politics. If you cannot trust the 5 people you work closest with, you're in enemy territory. Prepare to be stabbed, shot and handed a live grenade without a pin. No one really wins in politics. CEOs who make more than 10 times the person two levels down in management. This is true in major hospitals, universities and corporations almost as a rule. I have one bit of advice for you: quit your job, you're a glut on society and wasting everyone's time and resources. Sell your beachfront condo and join the peace corp. Don't work for people who pick Microsoft products exclusively, unless there is a good reason. They're wasting your time and their development dollars. When recruiters are good, and when they are a waste of time: Recruiters who don't know about the business they are hiring for has always been a pet peeve of mine. I can't stand them. Worse, I can't stand companies who give recruiters "the endless circle" of skills for technical positions that make no sense logically. Those positions probably aren't ever filled and are just ways to either mine your resume for data to thwart competition (even Google does this, mining naive college graduates for the latest trends in the university), or are designed as busy work because the contact who speaks to the recruiter is too afraid to tell the recruiter to stop calling. Recruiters spend a lot of time talking to contacts at various companies and their relationship lasts longer than your job, so expect a lot of noise in the system. The incentives are skewing the results and unless you've got a golden contact at a recruiting firm who just loves you, you're probably just another resume in a stack. Recruiters often filter out otherwise good candidates and totally forget everything from manners to common decency when making connections. Don't work for a company that has so many skills listed in a position that you can't count them on your two hands. No one does good work when they are so broadly applied that they cannot ever become useful. Their job will crumble and fall apart because it has no focus, and the position will be forever seeking a new candidate. On building a good team: Specialization means honing generalization. Don't hire people who don't have any skills. More importantly, don't hire people who are afraid to do work outside of their comfort zone. Look for Davinci Complexes - people who have skills in both technical and creative fields. Those people are versatile and quick learners. Anyone who is afraid to read a manual is wasting your time. Don't let them. Find people who are hungry for knowledge, have skill and accept that they must add new skills. Anyone who resists ongoing education is missing the point entirely. Don't hire people who are non-specific or lack confidence. Lacking confidence is not revealed by a nervous response to a question, rather, it is displayed when a candidate approaches a task and cannot commit to a time-frame. Find committed people who are willing to do the real deal - not the bare minimum, but the quality you'd expect from yourself or higher. Over 25? Don't ever take a pay cut more than 20% Don't let hiring managers and human resources people talk you down. The purpose of a meritocracy is to reward experience. If you're over 25, you don't need anymore "experience building" or "resume building" experiences unless you're moving from one CEO position to another. Your career is already started and by 30 in many ways its half over. Taking a pay cut in a recession happens sometimes - it's to be avoided even then - but sometimes we must. However, your time is valuable and you should mention that your previous salary was commensurate (or was even too low), explaining that the fiscal demands have to meet the job criteria. You need wealth - not a wage - and corporations need to recognize that but don't always. We do this for money, not for notches on the proverbial bedpost. If they won't talk money, then they're crazy: professionals work for cash, not for experience. If you did it for experience, you'll probably enjoy a job that involves adult entertainment or travel more than you'd want to work in an office.

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Article Tags: entrepreneur, hiring, team building



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