Hire the best
A few years ago, Friedman and one of his managers were interviewing a prospective employee who would work under that manager. During the interview, Friedman was very honest with the candidate.
“I want you to want his job,” he told the candidate while pointing at the manager.
The candidate’s eyes lit up at the excitement and possibility of starting at the bottom and taking his boss’s job, and that excited Friedman. But later, after the interview, that manager pulled Friedman aside.
“I wish you’d stop telling these people to want my job,” he said to Friedman.
That concerned him because it showed Friedman that the manager wasn’t looking to hire people better than him or who had the potential to be better than him, and that’s what you need when you’re creating a strong organization.
“Good managers really want people who can do their job because the more people that we have who are that capable, the better the overall company is,” he says.
In order to get those people who have the ability to advance in your organization, it’s crucial for both parties to be honest in the hiring process.
“At the executive level, it starts out with a tremendous amount of honesty on both parts, because if the strategy that I lay out is simply to capture the interest of the prospect, then just like a customer may feel let down or disappointed if we don’t deliver on the high level of service we provide, that employee or that officer is going to be disappointed if we didn’t deliver in terms of the strategic direction, so the honesty starts on our part,” Friedman says.
Be sure to share your company’s goals and vision and strategic direction so that the candidate gets a good idea of what he or she is potentially entering in to. But you also have to make sure that you honestly get the candidate’s goals and vision, too.
“If they really want to be the CEO and their job as a VP is simply to take my job, that wouldn’t necessarily be bad — but if I don’t understand their career objectives, in that sense, if there’s somebody else who may be in line for that position, and I know that, and I’m able to say, ‘Well, look, if that’s your objective, you should probably look at another company because there are two or three people that would have that opportunity before you,” Friedman says.
You also have to get your employees’ goals so that you can best meet them, as well.
“If they don’t tell us what their objectives are, it’s more difficult for us to provide that path in which they’ll constantly feel motivated and excited and happy to come to work every day to help contribute to our success,” he says.
Establishing two-way honesty in the hiring process is also critical, because it sets the expectation for how they should communicate once new employees start with the company.
“Have that understanding upfront so when it’s at a high enough level, where you’ve had that discussion, then the proof is in the pudding,” he says. “If the strategy I laid out and the growth and the plans and the way we operate and the culture I laid out is the way it is, that person knows pretty quickly, ‘Hmm, that person was honest with me in the process.’”
And once you have someone you want to bring into your organization, be willing to put out the money. Years ago, Friedman says AEC tried to pay as little as it could get away with, but over the years, the company shifted to paying more so it could attract the best. AEC is now committed to paying around the 75th percentile of the pay grade for any given job responsibility.
“When you do that, if that person isn’t well-suited for the position, we’re able to, from a pay perspective, easily replace them, … ” Friedman says. “We want to pay fairly, we want to pay at the high end of the range, we want to get performance, and if that person isn’t able to perform at the level we expect, we want to be able to quickly replace them and be realistic about how much it’s going to cost to replace them.”
