Adam Mopsick says that
there’s always the risk that
when you’re hiring, you may
hire the wrong person.
And there’s a lot of lost time
when you do that, so you need
to get it right the first time.
“If you have the wrong person in place, you may end up
spending too much of your time
looking over their shoulder; it’s
not productive for everybody
involved in that process,” says
the founder and president of
Amicon Development Group.
“The more that an individual
can handle on their own, it
increases their value to the
company because it allows for
everyone else to go out and do
other things.”
Mopsick has gotten the right 35
employees in place at his construction management and development company, and doing so
has helped Amicon reach 2007
revenue of $70 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Mopsick about how to get the
right people at your company
and how to create a level of
trust with them.
Let the job candidate do most of
the talking.
I’ve learned through
experience to try and let the
candidates do most of the talking if possible. Too often, if you
tend to lead them or talk too
much about yourself, the company or what the job requires,
they tend to regurgitate what
they think you want to hear.
It’s better to let them talk
about themselves, their experiences and their own values,
and you’d be surprised what
kind of information you can
get out of someone speaking
on a topic that’s unrelated to
their own work experience.
Sometimes it gets quiet; you
need to let them kind of go.
We look for two main qualities, and that’s desire and intelligence. We’ll take that over experience any day, because they’ll
gain experience over time, but
they’ll never gain the motivation
or intelligence to do it.
It’s somebody who gets out
of bed in the morning, and
they have a fire burning, and
they want to go out and push.
They may not have the experience that somebody else has,
but ultimately, they’re going to
be the ones who get things
done.
It’s not always easy to sift
through and talk to find it out
in an interview. All you can do
is go by your own judgment,
maybe bring them back for
second interviews, talk to
them about other topics, and
check resumes and references.
If someone doesn’t get those
points across during an interview, then they’re not going to
be the right person.
Don’t overmanage.
Set up a framework that’s more goal-oriented.
Rather than say, ‘I want you to
finish one, two, three points
today,’ try to set up something
where they have to go through
all those points to get to the end
result, because ultimately, it’s
the end, it’s the goal that’s the
most important.
It may take them more steps
than it might have taken you
or another manager, but the
key is to allow them to get
there and allow them to get
there by themselves. It’s just as
easy for me to pick up the
phone and call someone they
may need to call to get something accomplished, but they
need to go through the
process to understand and
develop the shortcuts on their
own for next time.
The key is to have the right
people in the right position. If
you have the right people, ultimately they’ll figure out a way
to get it done. Develop templates and things that they
can’t vary from — certain
company standards and systems, standard schedules,
standard purchase orders, a
framework that they can work
within, so that you have some
companywide standards, but
at least there’s room for variation based on individual ability
within the framework.
