Years ago, Anne Taylor gained an appreciation for just how challenging it can be to
hire the right people.
Taylor was in her mid-20s and a partner in
a small business.
“I was interviewing people, and one of
the other partners in the business said he
thought I was making a mistake on some of
the people,” she says. “He told me that I
wasn’t looking for people better than me.
He said, ‘You ought to only be looking for
people better than you are.’”
As a young person in the world of business, that didn’t compute for Taylor.
“I found that to be rather a concern for
me,” she says. “First of all — having no
humility at that age — could I find someone better than me? But I thought that if I
did find someone better than me, it would
be threatening to me in some fashion.”
Taylor, who is now the managing principal for the 4,800-employee mid-America
region of financial advisory services firm
Deloitte LLP, says time and experience
showed her that personal pride must
always take a backseat to the good of the
company when hiring. Hiring someone
who is better than you doesn’t necessarily
mean you need to hire someone who is an
all-around superior person. It means that
you must recognize your own shortcomings
and the shortcomings in the collective skill
set of your employees, and then hire to
strengthen those weaknesses.
“They might not be better in every way,
but they might be better in certain ways,”
Taylor says. “That piece of advice is still
true. When I look for new recruits, they
might bring something that I, even with
more than 25 years of experience, might
not bring to the table. There might be a
knowledge of technology, an energy or just
something in their breadth of experience.
“I still always look for that, how are they
going to be better than I am, better than we
are collectively as a group.”
Here’s how Taylor leveraged that experience to help her find and keep the best people at Deloitte.
