Hire great people
While he missed on the process planning, he did great at hiring the right people, but it wasn’t easy. Most people coming in didn’t have the industry experience, so Snyder had to look at other facets of their personalities and experiences to see if they would fit.
“When you’re interviewing, you have to focus less on nuances of a person’s past experience and more upon who they are as people,” he says. “You have to be very probative as to whether they’re open thinkers.”
He also needed people who were more entrepreneurial minded.
“There wasn’t a road map for where we were going,” Snyder says. “The tactical decision-making at the firm really had no good precedence out there, so we were making stuff up as we went along.”
People needed to be comfortable with this kind of decision-making process, and he also needed people who were willing to chip in their own ideas.
“We had to have people willing to offer their best ideas and make the argument for that in terms of the firm’s development and direction, and I think that’s been the greatest key to our success — the quality of senior managers we’ve been able to attract.”
Snyder has key questions he likes to ask in every interview. One example is, “What’s your handicap in golf?” If someone is married and has kids, and his or her handicap is a two, then Snyder won’t offer them the position.
“The only way you get that type of handicap is by spending a lot of time in golf, which itself is a time-consuming proposition, and the type of person who would be doing that is spending so much time on the golf course that, in my view, they’re taking away from what they should be doing professionally or with regard to their family,” he says. “ … That’s not the kind of person I want at Stream.”
Another indicator of whether someone will fit in is how comfortable he or she feels talking about his or her personal situations.
“Whether we like it or not, in today’s work environment, it’s almost impossible to completely segregate your personal lives from your professional lives,” Snyder says.
It’s important for people to be honest about any problems or issues they’re having in their personal life, so Snyder can plan for that.
“We can’t accommodate someone’s temporary personal situation
if we don’t know about it,” he says. “Why is this person always in a bad mood these days? Why are they absent from the office more than normal? Unless they communicate those things to us, we can’t know as to how we can help. We don’t know what to expect.”
And this all starts in the interview process.
“When someone doesn’t want to talk about that in an interview process, it sends a signal to me that this is not the type of person who’s going to be receptive to that type of atmosphere we’ve tried to build,” Snyder says.
He just wants to get to know job candidates as deeply and personally as possible in the allotted interview time.
“You want to see how their mind works,” he says. “If you’re a customer service manager for another electricity firm here in the state, you can tell me about all the wonderful projects that you did at this firm that saved the company X amount of dollars and cut down call times by that many seconds, but that goes in one ear and out the other because, all that, that’s what I would expect to hear in an interview.
“By hearing what’s important in terms of their priorities and hearing out loud and getting them to think out loud so I can see their mind operating in real time — those are the key things.”
