Tomicide Solutions November 2006: Seven Early Warning Signs of Mishiring Business Development Team Members

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

As you're reading this article, there are lots of lean and mean business development teams in organisations that, in spite of their small size, achieve amazing sales results. Yes, sometimes life can get tough for them. They can work long hours every now and then and feel tremendous pressure.

But in spite of all the hardship, they are committed to do the kind of work that puts them in the "world-class" category and creates the level of camaraderie most organisations never experience. They are committed to make their companies the best they can be.

So, how do you explain that a nine-person business development team, including the webmaster and all salespeople can achieve better net profit per employee, than most organisations' overstaffed sales and marketing departments.

It's simple really.

They operate as a flexible, super-agile "commando" of cross-trained, highly collaborative professionals as opposed to a large army of compartmentalised specialists.

Business development commandos use the kind of leadership model that allows them to be responsive and flexible to conduct their missions with maximum impact. Most traditional sales and marketing departments are so busy to pursue short-term quotas that they don't have time to implement a long-term plan.

Business development commandos are small, agile and loyal cross-trained generalists armed to the teeth with the most "lethal" business development "weapons", so they can strike with deadly precision. Most traditional sales and marketing departments are specialists who happen to work under the same roof, but in isolation.

Business development commandos operate on constant testing and experimentation. Their motto is that there is always a better way. And they keep working on to discover better ways. Most traditional sales and marketing departments do some kind of survey or market research and base their work on that. There is no experimentation because the research defines what to do and how.

Business development commandos consist of carefully selected people. But not selected on academic achievements and so-called track record. No. They are selected for character and attitude. Companies know that people with the right character and attitude can learn the stuff pretty quickly. Most traditional sales and marketing departments are put together based solely on academic achievements but with no regard for passion, enthusiasm and energy.

If you recognise your company's sales and marketing department in the previous section, then you might find the rest of the article valuable.

Thanks to what we call conventional wisdom, most service companies keep making the same old mistakes when it comes to hiring new members to join their business development teams.

According to various surveys, 86% of the North American employee population is misemployed. More bluntly, 86% of employees hate either their bosses, their jobs or even both. It's really hard to achieve peak performance with this kind of work force. Based on this fact alone, we can establish that the traditional HR approach of hiring people is a disaster. Actually many employees quit as a result of being treated like dirt by their companies' HR departments.

I actually dare to propose that IT companies should hire the kind of people in their HR departments who don't have a congenital hatred for fellow humans. Walk into a company with a portable "Couldn't-care-less" meter and you're likely to have the highest reading in the HR department.

In the 21st century we have to see beyond merely hiring impressive resumes.

Many years ago there was a survey done by Harvard Business School about what skills people need to excel in their jobs. The result was 85% of self-management, intra- and interpersonal skills and a mere 15% of specific technical skills. So, if you want to become a world-class butcher, your professional development must consist of 85% of enhancing your soft skills and only 15% of enhancing your butchering skills.

Later this study was repeated by Stanford University and the Carnegie Foundation, and their ratio was 88% and 12%. How come that HR people don't seem to be aware of this survey. Or do they just decide to ignore it, so they can continue doing what they've always done. This is just one more proof that some people regard performance as performing tasks regardless of the outcome.

In order to hire the right people we have to understand the difference between...

Causes and Effects

The results produced by the team are effects, and many companies try to manage at this level. It's like the healthcare system which is really a disease management system. Call me an ignorant swine, but if I have a disease, I want to get rid of it not to manage it. But what do I know anyway? Most of my healthcare experience revolved around preparing bodies for funeral and then either burying or cremating them. Oh... and yes, you've heard it right. Some bodies do sit up on the baking tray at a certain temperature while being cremated. Interesting experience to watch them.

Now back to teamwork for live team members not corpses...

When you measure the results, you use lagging indicators. They are called so because something must happen to be able to measure them. In your organisation, sales figures are lagging indicators, or effects.

The other type of indicators are leading indicators or causes. Low sales figures are created by several causes, such as low level of devotion to duty, excitement, enthusiasm, poor sales leads, too few sales leads. Trying to increase sales by rubbing sales figures into salespeople's noses is similar to trying to make contraceptives retroactive. Nice theory, that's all.

Results are created by the appropriate application of...

  1. The right mindset (Optimism, faith. etc.)

  2. The right behaviours (being on time, etc.)

  3. The right attitudes (Positive thinking)

  4. The right internal conditioning

  5. The right skills and unique abilities

And previous research done by Harvard, and later validated by Stanford and the Carnegie Foundation, indicates that some 85% of the person's success depends on the first three factors and only 15% depends on skills. Actually, the Carnegie Foundation's conclusion was 88% and 12%. Do you know why moronic HR managers are still hiring based on resumes and spotless employment records?

Results are the effect. The other five are the causes to achieve or to fail to achieve the results. And the funny thing is that your skills make the smallest contribution to creating results. Yes, most companies, due to being misled by idiotic HR staff, are looking for impressive resumes.

Marines: Join only if you don't mind taking orders, firing a weapon and have your head shaved. I don't mind taking orders for they are in synch with the Code I've bought into when I joined.

Warning Sign 1: It's Hard to Teach an Old Dog New Tricks

This is not even about teaching old dogs new tricks. It's about accepting and living by the values and Code of Honour your current team members live by. And this is an important point.

As the story goes, legendary college basketball coach, John Wooden forbade his players to have any kind of facial hair. One day, superstar Bill Walton turned up for training unshaven and declared he didn't care about Wooden's rules, and he was going to grow a beard.

Wooden looked him in the eye and calmly told him that he admired a man of principle, and strong convictions who felt so strongly about his beliefs that he was willing to give up his scholarship at UCLA, and wished Walton all the best on another college team. Next morning the Walton returned freshly shaven.

In his book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman gives another sports example. In 1984, basketball coach Bob Knight told Charles Barkley to show up for the second Olympic training camp weighing 265 lbs the most or else...

Barkley showed up at 280 lbs. Knight cut him out of the team immediately.

The sad truth is that in the corporate world similar disciplinary issues are overlooked because the person in question is a superstar.

I believe that the old dogs that refuse to learn new tricks must be shot. Not literally of course. And the "kill" must be quick, clean and humane, but it must be done.

People must know that there are consequences of not operating by the company's Code of Ethics. If the Code says, people must engage in constant learning to stay on the top of their crafts, you must call your cruisers on the carpet and read them the Riot Act.

One "sentence" I've helped to implement at some clients is hard labour. When the sin is not strong enough for dismissal, sinners are asked to take time off from their normal work (unpaid of course), and put in certain amount of days at the local Labour Ready office. Labour Ready Ltd. provides temporary labourers for the construction industry. The work is very hard and the payment is just above the legal minimum wage.

The impact is profound. Imagine a grossly overweight sales manager with a superstar syndrome putting in two months of hard labour, and returning to work. Well, he's no longer grossly overweight. But his ego is bruised, battered and full of blisters. One thing is almost certain. The superstar attitude is gone. Now he is willing to pay attention.

The problem is that most companies have nice rules to play by, but don't have the guts to implement serious enough consequences for non-players. People know that they can explain mishaps to their managers and most managers will be sympathetic to them. But this is just an invitation to doing it again.

When an employee shows up late the third time, that means two weeks labour. It's written down black and white and no one can wiggle his way out of the sentence. What I've found that after doing some time at Labour Ready, people start taking the expectations more seriously.

Vancouver is the marijuana capital of North America. There are more potheads than in London that has 10 times of the population. Why? Because they can get away with it. A bit south of Vancouver, Surrey is the car theft capital of North America. Why? Because car thieves get released almost immediately after capture. There is no punishment.

The local Gestapo (As I call the Vancouver Police because of their brutal methods on mostly innocent people) are too busy chasing and punishing people who exceed the speed limit by 1 mph or travel with train tickets that expired one minute before checking. It seems the policy is about harassing the easy targets and collecting as much fine from them as possible. In the meantime, drug gangs are thriving.

So, due to lack of consequences, the crime rate is growing.

So, in my opinion there is a way to teach old dogs new tricks, and when the old dog has no option, he must learn or leave. Again, it's not the manager who fires the old dog. It's the old dog who says, I'm not willing to do this, so I'm out. In most companies old dogs say, "I'm not willing to do this, so just leave me alone."

For some of you this may sound too harsh and militaristic. Sort of command and control. And it is to a certain extent. The military maintains very high level of discipline which, by default, is very inconvenient for most people. Why? Because as a result of relaxed discipline people can die.

Similarly, as a result of relaxed discipline organisations die and destroy the lives of many of the people who worked hard to put that organisation on the map. Many accountants at Arthur Andersen used to work very honestly and very hard to build their careers and provide better futures for their families.

And all of the sudden some greedy, undisciplined bastards at the top who thought they could get away with it, ruined everything for the rest of the gang.

So, I'd like to encourage you to develop specific consequences for your people when they break your Code of Ethics. Oh, and make sure you have the balls to develop a Code of Ethics and operate by it.

Warning Sign 2: Making a Hiring Decision Based on Resumes

Most companies are still hiring people just because at some points in their lives they managed to memorise their teachers' opinions and regurgitate is at a reasonable accuracy, so they earned diplomas and certificates. The problem is that people who work in diploma-issuing institutions are employees on regular paycheques, union backings and government pensions. They have never worked in business in any shape or form and don't have the "business mentality."

Now what happens to the people who "graduate" under the aegis of these institutions? One thing is certain. They have nice diplomas and certificates, certifying that they are marketing experts, web designers, search engine optimisation experts, etc. But they've never orchestrated marketing campaigns, never designed websites and never optimised websites for search engine that were expected to produce return on investment. They went through some pre-created activities and that's it.

So, at the end of the day they will end up with various pieces of papers that look nice on resumes, but realistically they don't mean much.

Personally I've always believed that making hiring decisions based on resumes is retarded. Resumes show what marketing calls features not benefits.

I can have an MBA, but what does that mean to the company in terms of getting and keeping clients? Most MBAs by nature are not suitable for business development. Why? Because the MBA school trained them to be risk-allergic. Don't rock the boat and make sure to pick up your paycheque every other Friday.

The other problem is that the CEO or the senior officer with profit/loss accountability are scanning the horizon to acquire new talents that can bring the company new value. Most smart CEOs have this message vibrate in their eyes, "Attention! Value Acquisition Starts Here!" They are looking for true talents.

In contrast, most HR managers are scanning the horizon for people who can perform tasks at competitive(ly low) wages. They are scanning the bottom of the unemployment scum barrel, hoping to find some people whose IQs are at least a tiny bit larger than their shoe sizes. Considering that some 86% of all employees are misemployed, that is, they hate their jobs and/or bosses, we can conclude that most companies would be better off by instantly firing their HR goon squads.

Do you see what I mean?

Smart CEOs are looking for high return on investment, and willing to pay for it. HR managers are looking for low investment and are willing to sacrifice ROI.

Consequently, CEOs find the most suitable people whom they perceive are able to do the work. HR managers find people whose resumes match some rigidly developed spec sheets.

So, who do you want to hire? Talents or impressive resumes?

Warning Sign 3: The Best of the Mediocre Leftovers

Here is important point that is constantly overlooked. Growing a business starts on the inside. First you develop the capacity for more or better work by hiring more or better skilled staff and then your business will grow on the outside.

Can you see it. First you invest in new capabilities and then you enjoy the return on your investment. Have you ever heard braindead CEOs say that as soon as they have more work, hence more money, they spend part of that money to hire new staff and get new equipment to be able to get the new work done.

Imagine a military general, "Boys, although you have no weapons now, but if we win this battle, we'll take the enemy's weapons and use them to win the next battle." Personally I wouldn't want to be in this general's army. Why? Simply because I prefer to live and a suicide mission is not my strong point.

Hiring great talent is far too important to leave to the last moment. As Harvey Mackay writes in one of his books, his company is open for hiring 24/7/365 when the right person walks in even if he's not in hiring mode. And here is the key. You may not be in hiring mode but your competitors are.

What if you reject a kick-arse marketer because you're not hiring, and one of your competitors hires her? She will activate all her kick-arse expertise to put you out of business. Nothing nasty, you understand. She's just doing her job for your competitor, which includes scooping up the best of the target market and leaving you with the sludge.

Here in Vancouver, Canada the construction industry is booming. Every idiot can find contracts. So, no one bothers to market. But it's bust that follows boom. And it's coming. So, what will happen to most of the construction companies in a few years. They go tits-up and there is not a dickybird they can do about it.

Construction companies could use this time to strengthen their market positioning, so they get strong enough to prosper after the boom. But no! They don't waste money on marketing; just work harder on current projects. They hire more and more construction workers and lay them off when the boom is over.

Realise that business development is an ongoing process and you have the best people in your business development department to furnish you with a steady stream of projects and long-term opportunities. The bidding process is getting harder and harder. And after the boom, it will be bidding hell. If you're treated like a commodity today, tomorrow you'll be treated like dirt.

You'll have less and less to say how you run your contracts. And if you don't comply with your clients' demands, you'll be dropped from the project like hot potato.

So, I suggest that you put out a shingle that says that your door is always open to the right people. This way you can better find the best people and you don't have to rely on the best of the available - often mediocre - leftovers.

Warning Sign 4: We Need Experts Only

What 99.9% of HR departments and a bit lower percentage of senior managers fail to realise is that business development is not industry specific. Yes there are differences between marketing commodities and premium IT solutions, but let's get real.

The rapidly sinking IBM hired Lou Gerstner as the new CEO to turn the company around and save it from certain death. Lou was a food expert, so how come he managed to save IBM. Because his skills were portable. And in specific technical areas he listened to old IBMers and considered their advice. And before IBM he had been the CEO of a commodity business: Food. And out of that knowledge base he helped IBM to become the worlds largest professional service firm.

Was Lou an IT expert. Definitely not. He was an expert in business, that is, how to how to find people with money and exchange their money for IBM stuff. To do this he doesn't even have to know how to switch a computer on. It's just a minute detail.

What you experts are people who have a certain level of solidified rigid knowledge on certain topics. Just think of the audio experts at Sony. While they were experimenting with the next generation of portable CD players, Apple invented the iPod, and pushed Sony out of the music industry.

Just look at the greatest inventions and innovations in the world. What they have in common is that almost none of them was invented by industry experts. Think of business management and two recognised "business gurus": Peter Drucker was a lawyer and Tom Peters is an engineer with an MBA.

Or think of the small business guru Michael Gerber and his E-Myth concept. What is Michael actually? An encyclopaedia salesman, a saxophone player, carpenter, a poet and who knows what else. Yet, INC. 500 CEOs regard his book, The E-Myth Revisited, the most important business book ever written.

Or look at David Ogilvy, a former farmer, apprentice chef, appliance salesman and secret agent and the founder of one of the best advertising agencies ever existed in history, Ogilvy and Mather. Here are some of his hiring criteria...

As you can see, great innovation has always come from outside the walls of an industry. Regardless of how hard you're pushing your pencil, but if you're colouring within the lines, you'll always remain within the lines. But truly great stuff usually lies outside the lines, where most people, driven by their industries' conventional wisdom, never look, let alone having the balls to go.

Rajat Gupta, the worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Co., has this to say about the unique benefits of people with multi-disciplinary perspectives, "Some of our best people are those who studied literature or the classics, and who later received business training. These people tend to understand the array of forces at work in organizations, and they approach decisions in a very well-rounded way."

As Abraham Maslow once said, If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For an ad agency every business problem can be solved with more advertising. For the leadership training firm every business problem requires one more leadership workshop. And the worst of all: For the motivational speaker, it's one more motivational speech.

But we're living in a complex world and what you need is not specialists with deep but narrow skills sets but an enthusiastic collection of "Swiss Army knife" type people.

Another problem is that, when hiring, companies specify skills sets they're looking for, instead of saying what symptoms they're experiencing, and people who have solved similar problems in the past can apply. Think about it. The company is experiencing the symptom, but they don't know the problem. If they did, they wouldn't need you. They would know what to do without spending money on hiring a new person. They invest in you hoping you can solve a problem.

And as Simone Weil once said: "Attachment is a great fabricator of illusions. Reality can be attained only by someone who is detached."

Why do you think doctors don't accept their patients; self-diagnosis and prescribe heart surgery based on what their patients tell them. That would be a disaster.

I'm amazed when a CEO or director of business development tells me that "Our sales are falling, so we hire some more people to do cold calling." They admit that cold calling doesn't work, but they hope that some minimum wage school kids will solve the problem and sales will go through the roof.

So, never mind the expert status. Hire passionate, excited and enthusiastic people. Using Ralph Iron's words, "Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour."

Just think about how John Bertrand and his layman team of amateur "sailors", won the America's Cup in 1983. The first team in the 132 year history of the America's Cup that beat the all-professional US team. Bertrand's team was a motley crew of people from all sorts of unrelated professions. But they won because they worked as a team. All other teams were poisoned with highly skilled and competent, hence high ego, sailing professionals, who were too busy seeking their personal glories at the expense of the team.

Hire for attitudes and train for skills. You can't go wrong with this approach.

Warning Sign 5: Impressive without Substance - Looking Vogue But Being Vague

"There's a lady who's sure, All that glitters is gold, And she's buying a stairway to heaven." ~ Led Zeppelin

Like the lady in Jimmy Page's and Robert Plant's imagination, many hiring managers get fooled by superficial vogueness. At that point many managers fail to look beyond the veneer. And here I don't mean references. Actually I've found references useless. What I find much better than references is to be able to read the candidate like a book. Again, I give you a military example. The military doesn't do reference checks. The recruiting officer is 100% confident in the training officers' ability to bring out the best in every recruit, that references are not necessary.

Why is that? Because the military recruits character traits and attitudes, knowing that the drill sergeants can teach anyone how to shoot, dig a trench and throw a grenade. But they can't teach character of honesty, loyalty, devotion to duty, commitment and accountability. They will be improve during service, but if it's not there, no drill sergeant can put it there.

Since you hire for business development, many of these people have been salespeople before, and many of them have the traditional smoothness and glibness to gently ram you to the ground and you end up hiring them. Make sure you don't get overly impressed by fast talk and glibness.

In today's world of commerce prospects are more afraid of than respectful for smooth-talking overdressed peddlers than ever. The market has also become smarter than ever. A Gucci suit and a few well-rehearsed clichés are no longer enough to sell a million dollar network integration solution.

There are morons out there who start the hiring process for web designers by looking at their portfolios. And this is a major flaw because you evaluate these people's ability against what their clients asked them to create, which often don't represent their own skills. You also never know how many subcontractors had worked on various aspects of projects that make up the portfolio.

If you're a chiropractor, you can't evaluate a designer's skills by looking at a website the candidate designed for a brain surgeon any better than you can evaluate a restaurant based on a slice of tomato.

So, why is it done? Because it's traditional and convenient. And it takes very little time. Companies hate investing in their hiring processes. That's why most of the newly hired folks fail. Many companies operate on a "bring them in, burn them out and unceremoniously dispose of them" basis. I believe you can tell the real age of a company by averaging the tenure of the employees. After all, when you hire new people in key positions, it's like starting the company all over again almost from scratch.

And in the 21st century it's not technical knowledge that cuts the mustard. It's the soft stuff. The old adage, "No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care." You have top hire people who have strong "caring" muscles. People with coaching and counselling skills to interact with clients. People who love working with people.

Several years ago as an engineer I realised that working in isolation as an engineer wasn't my calling in life. I knew I wanted to work with people to co-create some seriously neat shit.

So, when you hire new people, tell them about the super-high standards and expectation at your company, and pay only secondary or even tertiary attention to technical skills. Those can be learnt but character is once and for all.

One key question can be: Describe your singe biggest career accomplishment. And then look for words "we", "us" and "our" as opposed to "I", "we" and "my". This will clearly tell you whether you're talking to a team worker or a Prima Donna.

Warning Sign 6: Using Recruiting Agencies

What amazes me is that most CEOs and presidents have plenty of time to participate in trivia like personally selecting and test-driving cars for the company fleet, personally overseeing the purchase of the mahogany desk for the board room, personally inventorying all the stuff in the staff kitchen, but when it comes to hiring new people, they outsource it.

The battle cry is "Our people are our No.1 assets." Well, "we just don't give a shit about what kind of people join us to become our asset base."

It's so easy to hire an agency and abdicate (it's almost never delegation) staff hiring to it. And agencies over the years have developed all sorts of - mostly phoney - psychological approaches to find the right people. There is one thing they don't know. They don't know the company's business on an intimate level. Just like HR department, agencies too can only hire people who match a rigidly drawn job description with specific education.

Imagine a bank is looking for an investment advisor, and one of the criteria is an MBA. If I submit my application to an agency without the MBA, I get rejected right away. But if I write to directly the bank manager and say, "I'm a high school dropout, but have worked in the past 25 years as Warren Buffett's personal assistant, and I understand how the world's greatest investor thinks." I dare to say that any bank manager with more than two brain cells would interview this person right away.

Over the years, I have helped many people to write resumes and cover letters that got them jobs. The interesting thing is that when we write down all the benefits and value previous employers received by having these people on board and send these resumes to executives, most executives are instantly ready to talk to these candidates. When we send the same letters to agencies (or HR department), they either don't respond or ask for "proper" resumes. The dumb clowns don't understand benefits, so they insist on reading the features. They just don't have the brainpower to comprehend a benefit like, "Introducing a new style of proposal, project acceptance rate went from 18% to 74%" within 6 months. They want "Attended proposal writing course at Brain dead University" type rubbish.

The reality is that you can't get lazy. If you say how important your people are, then participate in hiring the right people.

The funny thing is that today's CEOs, presidents and top executives are breathtakingly unproductive. According to a - I think - Gartner Group survey, the typical top dog performs 28 minutes of profit enhancing activity per day. Why? They are too busy correcting the mistakes of mishires at lower levels. For instance, salespeople are not allowed to write proposals to their prospects, only senior executives.

I've worked with an IT firm here in British Columbia, where only the president was allowed to write proposals for projects. His acceptance rate was about 7%, but he insisted on doing it. And while he was doing that, the recruiting agency kept hiring new staff who left within 4 months after finding out about the president's operational lunacies.

I'd like to encourage you to drop your agency, and if you want to hire great staff, do it for yourself. You can hire a consultant to collaborate with you to do it better than you could do alone, but keep it in-house. This function is far too important to farm out to agencies. After all, no one cares about your future as you do.

I've read somewhere that every year McKinsey & Co. collects 50,000 resumes. Out of the 50,000 resumes, senior partners select 1,000 people to interview and then the firm hires 50 people. And McKinsey doesn't use agencies. They are after talents not merely workers.

Are you after talents or merely workers? This is the iceberg-melting, mountain-flattening question here.

Warning Sign 7: Hiring in Isolation

Here we get back to the HR department. When the HR folks do the hiring, they hire in isolation. They don't fully understand the context of the work for which they're hiring. They put together a rigid job description, and base their hiring decisions on that. What that means is that if the requirement for applicants calls for a university degree in marketing, and one of the applicants has only street-smart education from some of the great marketing experts, like Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham or Jay Conrad Levinson, these "practical" people with "in-the-trenches" experience will be instantly rejected.

The HR folks are more likely to hire people with MBAs than hiring folks with practical knowledge. Sadly, most HR departments hire attractive resumes with impressive-looking schooling institutions. Yes, there is a specific reason why I don't call schooling education. They are two totally different concepts.

As we discussed earlier, people create results using their mindset, behaviours, attitudes, internal conditioning and last but not least their skills. We also know that skills contribute about 12-15% to the end results. Yes, HR departments doggedly focus on this small percentage while blissfully ignoring the ingredients for the other 85-88%. Is it surprising that some 86% of all employees hate their jobs and/or bosses?

A fairly recent Gallup Poll study indicates that 59% of the workforce is disengaged, 14% of the workforce is actively disengaged and that a mere 27% are engaged. The bad news is that most work places have 3 out of 5 disengaged workers. According to Gallup, these people show up like sleepwalkers on the job. Disengagement directly impacts productivity as well as how clients are treated.

But is this surprising at all. I don't think so. Just look at most career ads and you'll see. "Fireplace manufacturing company is hiring a highly experienced marketer with minimum 10 years experience in marketing fireplaces in Western Canada and a Master's degree in fireplace marketing. Marketer must have a thorough understanding of how fireplaces are made and how they operate. We pay a generous $10 per hour."

There are several problems here.

The poor bastard fireplace CEO hires one more clone. He believes that by staffing his company with fireplace experts, his company will become the best at selling fireplaces. This is the equivalent of McDonald's advertising: "McDonald's branch manager wanted. Must have a Ph.D. in food sciences and 10 years of Canadian burger flipping experience. Pay: $15 per hour."

The other part of the game is the pay. While manual labourers can be paid hourly wages, knowledge workers, like marketers cannot. No one can produce innovative marketing strategies on command while the clock is ticking. With this approach all you get is arses on seats in your marketing office who focus on marking time and achieving precisely dick.

Yes, they have all the right skills to do the work, but do they have the mindset, behaviours and attitudes to do the work? Most of them don't. Hence the high turnover rate and the high misemployment costs.

Make sure that you hire your own people not HR. After all, you have to work with them. Why would you just accept anyone HR sends you just because they fulfilled the criteria on a rigid document HR created. Maybe it's a good idea to study why the army has almost zero attrition (except for fatalities and discharge due to either health issues or court martial.)

The army never uses hiring agencies and never uses the equivalent of HR in the recruiting process. The proverbial HR comes to play later to help new soldiers to better settle in. And this should be HR's job in organisations. Helping new employees to settle in and feel good about working at the company.

I also believe that you should involve your whole team to interview new candidates. This shows that you have trust in and respect for your own people, and it's just practical, considering that they have to work together, and if the new person doesn't fit into the team, regardless of how much you like this person, you'd better go with the team's decision.

Summary

Hiring is a crucial part of the game. Everything stands or falls there. However, just because the new candidate doesn't rigidly fit into a mould of skills, you don't have to panic. But make sure they fit into a mould of values, mindset, behaviours and attitudes. Just look at the military.

They recruit people who've never shot weapons, never thrown grenades, never killed anyone. all in all they have no skills and no experience. In terms of skills they are lower than fresh graduates who have some skills abut no experience. And low and behold, in six months they become pretty skilled but they also have the right values, mindset, behaviours and attitudes.

Somehow the army knows how to develop these people pretty effectively yet pretty quickly. And after that initial investment in these people, they become pretty loyal and realisable throughout their times in the army. Actually many of them regard their military services as some of the best years of their lives.

And what is the result? More and more companies are hiring ex-army people because they have some attributes (not necessary skills) that are missing from people who've never been in the army. Just two of these attributes is a thorough understanding of words like "loyalty" (as opposed to keeping looking for better deals), "devotion to duty", (as opposed putting in bums-on-seats time)"collaboration" (as opposed to internal competition), "accountability" (as opposed to pointing fingers)and "commitment" (as opposed to trying if it's easy and cheap).

Mark Mehler writes in his book, CareerXRoads 2003...

"An increasing number of employers see the military as a good training ground for business."

According to Sprint...

"Skills you learned from the military are also essential at Sprint."

I don't say that you should hire only former military people, but here is another point to consider. The military is also regarded as the "Ultimate Professional Service Firm", and some people refer to it as the "World's finest management school."

According to Gallup surveys, the military tops the list as the most trusted institution in the US. Second is small businesses and third are the police. In contrast, Congress is rock-bottom, then Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO) and then big businesses. People may not come out of the army as business geniuses, but they come out with the right values, ethical and moral foundations upon which companies can build their specific business knowledge.

And we all know that good people can become good experts, but good experts may not become good people. And today's world of commerce, while being flooded with experts from Ivey League universities, is desperately short of good people.

But very often business knowledge without the moral foundation can lead to what we've seen in Arthur Andersen, Worldcom and Enron. Those people had business knowledge but were short on moral fibre.

Hint: It wasn't the lack of subject matter expertise that caused blew Arthur Andersen and Enron to some of the more pestilential pits of hell.

One Career Ad to Consider

A while ago I received this email from the Tom Peters Company. This is one of the best career ads I've ever read. And you can imagine that Tom Peters doesn't hire idiots. All right. I'm biased. I'm a raving Tom Peters fan, but this ad still kicks some serious arses. And notice how this ad attracts only the right people, the kind of people Tom wants.

WANTED!

Like-minded, nervy, energetic, brave, action-biased, radical clients to do Re-Imagine! work worth paying for... The King of the Tinkerer's need not apply...Interested?...Read on...

As you have probably heard Tom is re-imagining his own consulting business, Tom Peters Company. To do this we need even more like minded nervy, energetic, brave, freaky, action biased, radical Clients. We are Re-focussing our company, comprised of what Tom calls "like-minded radicals," to focus on "partnering with nervy clients as they face squarely up to the enormity and pace of the changes required by the emergent technologies, intensified competition, and a truly global marketplace."

Those changes, Tom adds, "require nothing less than wholesale re-imagining of the basic tenets of 'organising' - the idea of what makes an effective 'corporate culture' in a fundamentally unstable environment - and re-conception of the traditional bases for adding value to every product and service offering." He adds, "Our goal is simple to state. We aim to clarify and then catalyse exceedingly rapid, high-impact, high-visibility efforts undertaken with like-minded clients who will not settle for halfway solutions... These are not 'halfway' times!"

If you are a "Halfway solution" or "bums on seats training person" please do not apply. We want nervy, energetic, brave, and freaky. Don't worry if you are saddled with an MBA, it's not your fault OK! Provided you have not had your innovative business soul thrashed and theorised out of you, you may still be 'up' for building a partnership with us capable of Re-imagining your enterprise.

As you see there is no job description. No schooling requirement. No list of tasks to be performed. But you also get the feeling that you'll be expected to thrive to become world-class, the best you can be in your craft if you're accepted.

I encourage you to read Tom's books entitled "Re-Imagine" and "Talent 50." You may need some studying to fully understand the difference between talent and worker. And if you want to stay alive in the 21st century, you'd better staff your joint with unique talents not fungible workers.

So, when you hire again, remember the percentages from the beginning of this article. 85% of mindset, behaviours, attitudes, internal conditioning and a mere 15% of skills.

Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.