Hire by committee
A flustered waitress is buzzing from table to table as the
lunch-hour crowd bulges to peak capacity. When she
approaches the corner booth and hands Di Lillo his entree, he
asks her to “please pass the salt and pepper” with an air of sincerity that throws her slightly off guard. She smiles, nods
politely and passes him the shakers from the far opposite end
of the sizeable table. “Thank you so much,” he offers with a
pleasant stare of acknowledgement. She smiles again, replies
with a “You’re welcome,” and turns back into the fray.
In the hiring process, Di Lillo says a simple “Thank you”
can make all the difference. He places so much emphasis
on the pleasantry that he’ll actually turn down candidates
who don’t offer it after their first one-on-one interview.
“If someone interviews with me, I say, ‘I’m not going to
ask you for a decision,’” Di Lillo says. “‘I want you to take
this application home. If you have an interest in taking the
next step, you need to send this back. If you don’t, it was
really nice meeting you.’ If they send it back without a
thank-you note, they never hear from me. That was one of
the tests. Either they weren’t aware of a simple courtesy or
they were lazy, and I didn’t want either one of those two
people on the team.”
For those that do respond favorably, the next phase of Di
Lillo’s hiring process is a group interview.
“I’ve always wondered how (arranged marriages) actually
worked,” Di Lillo says. “They’d say, ‘Here’s a person you
don’t know, and now, you’re going to be married.’ That
seems like a tough deal. But, in a way, when we’re hiring
people, oftentimes, that’s what we do inside a company. A
lot of people will hire somebody and say, ‘Here’s a new
team member. You’re going to work with that person.’ If the
work environment is important, it seems to make good
sense to let your people participate in the hiring process.”
Di Lillo says a group interview is one of the best ways for
potential candidates to vet your company’s culture. It also
gives your current employees a sense of ownership and
responsibility and leads to valuable feedback and insight
that you might overlook in the initial interview.
“When they come back, they typically will interview with a
team of five to six people,” he says. “The team members all
get really involved in that. They have such great intuition
about what the character of the person is. It also gives the
interviewee an opportunity to ask somebody outside of the
leader, who is going to be somewhat biased or too optimistic, [about something] that the team members have a
better opportunity to clarify.”
When choosing who will participate in the interview, Di Lillo says to choose the team members who would be working alongside the candidate if he or she was hired. That’s
typically as easy as picking within departmental lines. In
the process, leave yourself out of the proceedings. Your
absence will lead to a more revealing discussion.
“Don’t participate in that interview portion of the hiring
process,” he says. “They’re with the individual team members and get to ask, ‘What’s it really like here? This guy over
here told me that everybody works well together, there’s a
culture of excellence, blah, blah, blah. What do you say?’”
Di Lillo says if any of your team members say no to that
candidate progressing in the hiring process, then you’ve got
to respect that feedback. If you truly want buy-in and the
best employees, the whole team has to sign off on that individual before they advance any further. This may slow
things down at times, but he says it’s necessary when hiring. If you really want team members who will give their all
while working toward a common goal, then you can’t just
accept everyone who turns in an application.
“If you get good quality [people] in, you have a better
chance to succeed,” Di Lillo says. “No good leader ever
wants to fire people or let them go. If you do a good job of
screening, qualifying and identifying, then you won’t do as
much of the firing. That’s a person who could be with you
for 25 years. Choose wisely.”
HOW TO REACH: City Visitor Inc., (216) 661-6666 or www.cityvisitor.com; PCX Holdings LLC,
www.pcxcorp.com; Advanced Hydro Solutions LLC, (330) 869-8451 or www.advancedhydrosolutions.com