Mark Miller says that
great employees want
to make a difference — whether they’ve been in the
workplace for years or they’re
fresh out of college.
“They don’t want to sit in a
cubicle for 10 years before
their voice really can be
heard,” says the chairman and
CEO of Allconnect Inc.
Those great employees are
a vital ingredient for a company to succeed, Miller says,
and without them, your
chances for failure increase.
As a result, Miller says
Allconnect, a 500-employee
company that helps people
establish essential services
during a residential relocation, is very particular about
the people it employs.
Smart Business spoke with
Miller about how to make
sure a prospective employee
will fit into your culture and
why test-drives shouldn’t just
be for new cars.
Q. How do you avoid hiring
the wrong person and getting
yourself into that situation?
You go through an extensive
interviewing process, and you
have a lot of people involved
in that at all levels of the
organization.
You do all the obvious reference checking you can and get
all the data points you can.
If you possibly can, if someone happens to be a free agent
or maybe they’re between
opportunities, you might say,
‘Why don’t you come in here
and help us on this project?
You test-drive Allconnect, and
we’ll test-drive you.’
At the end of a month or so,
we’re going to know if you love it here, and we want to
get married for life, or if you’re
going to be uncomfortable.
In a perfect world, you test-drive the opportunity for both
parties. Now, I’m not suggesting everyone who joins the
company needs to be a consultant, but especially with
senior leadership jobs, if you
can expose that person to
walking the halls for a period
of time before everybody signs
up in ink for the long term,
that truly helps you a lot.