Hire great people
Once when Jarvis and his team were looking to make a hire, everyone really liked the candidate, but the general manager walked into his office and said he had never seen an interview situation where the person actually worked out better in real life than he or she did in the interview — basically, the general manager just wasn’t there yet on this candidate. And that’s perfectly OK with Jarvis because if you want to take your company to the next level, then you have to make sure you get the best possible people to help you.
“It’s sort of like in tennis,” Jarvis says. “You play tennis, and the first serve, you have total control over it. It’s as good as it’s going to get. If you can’t make that shot work, it’s only going to get tougher. Some of those same things apply in terms of the gold-plated resumes.”
Because of that, Jarvis has been known to spend nearly two hours with a candidate, even if only an hour was slotted in his schedule.
“If I do nothing else in this company, if I hire well, we’ve got a great chance at being successful,” he says. “If I don’t, I almost can’t be good enough to succeed. There isn’t a tradeoff that makes that an acceptable exchange because frankly, I’m not that good. You can’t be good enough to make up for the deficit of a bad team.”
In addition to spending a couple of hours with a candidate, he says that the average candidate goes through at least five hours of interviewing over the course of multiple sessions. You need to ask questions that get at reality instead of the hypothetical. Jarvis asks candidates to take him back to a time when they worked for an organization and had to deliver great value at a low cost and asks them to describe the process, how they became good at it and to walk him through the challenges they faced.
“It’s easy to deal in the hypothetical,” Jarvis says. “You ask me any question in the hypothetical, and I can give you a pretty good hypothetical answer. I think it’s a lot harder to falsely draw from your own experience if it doesn’t exist.”
Jarvis also asks to hear about a time when the candidate had to go above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy a customer — describe the situation, what he or she did, why the action exceeded the customer’s expectations and how the customer reacted.
“If they say, ‘Oh, it was five minutes to 6, and we close at 6, and I let the customer come in,’ that’s far different from the experience of, ‘Well, it was 20 minutes after six, I had locked the door, we had already closed, we had done the cash count for the day, the power was off, everything was shut down, and I was walking out the door, and I was on my way to the car, and a woman rushed up to me and said, “Are you closed for the day? Did I miss you?” Yes, but how can I help you? Let’s go back in, …’” Jarvis says. “Getting to that level of realism really sorts out how someone perceives to go above and beyond.”
Another way to get a true picture of someone comes in how you check your references. Instead of calling and asking the standard questions, be more targeted in what you’re trying to learn.
“Ask people to stack rank based on five attributes,” he says.
For example, he often uses characteristics, such as being a self-starter, being ethical and being customer-focused, among other characteristics specific to the position.
“Rank them 1 to 5 because then they don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Oh that person, she’s actually great at all those things. She’s perfect at all those things,’” Jarvis says. “That’s what you get in a reference. At least if you get to what’s No. 5 on the list versus what’s No. 1 on the list, your next reference, you can say, ‘There are some concerns we have about this person being a self-starter, can you comment on that?’ Because that was No. 5 on that list. Then all of a sudden, you get to a, ‘Yeah, that’s not this person’s strength,’ and you get more integrity in the process.”
Lastly, you need to get a change of scenery into your interview process.
“Mix up the environment,” Jarvis says. “Ronald Reagan, when negotiating with the Russians, instead of sitting across the table from Gorbachev, got him and said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ They were at an absolute dead standstill. And Reagan got Gorbachev moving. It’s hard to disagree with someone you’re walking side by side. Just change the environment.”
For example, a few years ago, Jarvis’ assistant was moving on to another position, so he had her help hire a r
eplacement. She had screened 100 resumes and narrowed it down to a handful, and one seemed particularly promising as she went through the interview rounds, yet there was just something about her that didn’t seem right. So Jarvis invited her for a cup of tea at a restaurant, and there, she completely let her guard down and started talking about how she was out the night before really late with a group of friends and had overslept and backed up and hit a pole that morning, and now had to get her car fixed.
“I was just like, ‘Well, now we’re getting to it,’” he says. “It was just a different environment. If you walk in and sit down and say, ‘Well, how did your day go?’ It’s just a totally different question than, ‘Why don’t you walk me through a little bit of your resume and some of the jobs you’ve had and where you felt like you really made some contributions.’”
