Q. How do you
communicate the
vision to employees?
You only hire the people you believe can
embrace that vision and
those values.
When we interview
people, we look first
toward, do they share
our vision and our values? If they do that, then
they passed test No 1. In
our employee reviews,
the first item on the
review is our values.
When we fire people,
typically it’s because
they don’t meet our values. We can teach the skills in
our business and we can teach
our industry, but you can’t
teach someone to have those
key values that make you who
you are as a company.
Q. How do you determine
whether a potential employee
shares your vision and values?
You are never going to be
certain, but you are going to get clear on it. We have specific questions that we ask, and
look for specific answers. We
look for certain life experiences that people may or may
not have had.
Those things all kind of drive
back to who that person is,
and once you can get a sense
of who that person is, you
know where they sit on that
value scale. The only thing
that can help you there is your
gut.
So, it starts with asking the
right questions and then interpreting the answers with as
much clarity as you can get.
Q. What kinds of questions
can you ask in a job interview
to get at those things?
We’ll ask questions about
specific things in someone’s life that they were
really proud of doing. Then,
they will go into a story
about how they were proud
about it — it could be an
award that they won or
something like that.
Then you listen to the
tone and the passion in
which they explain how
they felt about that. You
can get a sense right there
if this person exudes pride
in what they do, which is a
key value in what they do.
So really, a lot of the
questions we ask are about
life experiences
I’ve been known to walk
into an interview and ask
one question and one question only, and it serves for
an hour interview. Typically, just by asking that
one question, I get all of
the answers that I need to
determine whether an individual has the characteristics consistent with our
values.
That question is, ‘Tell me
about your life from about
midway through high
school until today. But
don’t give me the stuff I
already read on your
resume. Tell me when you
laughed, tell me when you
cried, tell me what made
you scream for joy and
what you agonized about.’
You can really get a level
deeper and really get in to
how people really tick
and what’s important to
them.
HOW TO REACH: pulse220, (248) 200-3900 or www.pulse220.com
