Hire great people
As Hyland Software has grown, unlike many companies, it hasn’t waited until there is enough work to justify hiring new employees. The company has been proactive and hires employees well ahead of when they’ll actually be needed.
“We hired ahead of where we needed to hire to have people there so that when we got to a point, we were able to service the clients we had,” Hyland says. “It’s not like we held, off, held off, held off, and as soon as something hit, we hired a bunch. We hired a bunch and pushed the growth and kept on bringing people in. …You have to add good people all the time.”
Many may scoff at spending money on such expensive resources as employees before the business is there, but Hyland says that with great risk comes great reward and it’s just one part of pushing yourself to grow.
But it’s not just hire a bunch of people without any thought behind it. Hyland has a specific approach to the practice.
“It comes down to planning and figuring out what areas are going to be hotter than others,” he says.
He looks at the business and says that if it grows by X percentage on the sales side, that shows him how many people he needs to hire on the technical services or support side. He also brings into account data about how many people leave the company each year, as well.
“It’s really about looking at your business and analyzing the historical data and having some lens into where it’s going in the future,” Hyland says.
The key is that you have to be grounded in data and also be willing to use it.
“Spend some time sifting through the data,” he says. “A lot of people have the data but they don’t spend time cutting it up or slicing it from different angles. Every month we look at all of our sales, services data and figure out what’s happening. Are we seeing a couple trends over a couple months? What does that mean from an employee perspective?”
But it’s not just hard data that you have to incorporate into your hiring plans. Listen to what your customers are telling you, as well.
“You get comments from customers — ‘Hey, it’s tough to get a hold of you guys these days,’ or, ‘Your backlog for services is stretched out too long,’” Hyland says. “That immediately throws us a flag, and we say, ‘OK, we’re low in certain areas, and we want to make sure we have enough people to handle those volumes.”
As you assemble the data and the feedback, you’ll likely want to ask your department heads and managers what they think they’ll need in terms of human resources, as well, but Hyland says you also have to make sure to ask questions when you have those conversations.
“When you’re dealing with departments, people are going to ask for the moon,” he says. “If you ask what they need, they’re going to ask for a lot, and it’s good to have some checks and balances on that and check people and say, ‘Why would you need five people there?’ or, ‘Why would we need four people there?’ and make people come up with legitimate reasons.”
Once he knows how many people he needs to hire, then it’s time to focus on the hiring process itself.
“Setting expectations in the interview process is good,” he says. “[It’s] coming up with creative ways of drawing out personalities in an interview process.”
At Hyland Software, it’s a multistep process that doesn’t rely on one manager to make a decision. Applicants go through multiple interviews with both human resource staff members as well as managers they’ll be working with directly.
“Having the multi-interview process is helpful, but [it’s also] having them talk about experiences where they had to deal with adversity and see how they’re going to function in this environment to see if they’re self-starters,” Hyland says. “If you can come up with questions and approaches and draw that out, that’s going to be part of your success in bringing in the right people.”
He says it’s also helpful to be honest about their work environment and really share what it will be like.
“Have an overall tone of your department that’s communicated to the applicants so they can self-weed-out,” Hyland says. “‘OK, this is how it works here, and maybe it’s not perfect, but this is how we function, and if this is something that’s going to make you uncomfortable, maybe it won’t work.’ Setting proper expectations in both directions is very important.”
It’s also important to involve successful employees in the process. He says that if you have a couple successful individuals in a particular area that you’re hiring for, identify what traits they have that have made them succeed. Train those people to be a part of the interview process so you have more people involved, and look for those traits when interviewing.
Lastly, Hyland says it’s a common mistake to get excited about all the wonderful things you see on somebody’s resume and ignore the red flags that come up in your interview process.
“More often than not, if the HR [representative] isn’t feeling good about somebody in terms of their attitude or approach but their manager felt good about them, they’re not going to be successful here,” Hyland says. “It’s just the data shows that. There are always exceptions, but if you’re ranking fair to poor (and) a manager wants to trump that and say, ‘I want them anyway,’ we have some good data that shows that doesn’t always work out.”
