Hire great people
One of the first things Lewis focuses on is making sure he initially brings in great people to the organization.
“The intelligence or the aptitude is mandatory,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what kind of integrity and what kind of character and how hardworking a person is and how morally decent they are and what a fabulous person they are.
“You can’t start with someone who doesn’t have the potential that you need. That’s like hiring a philosophy major to be in accounting. Chances are, they’re very bright and very hardworking, but there’s a set of data that they don’t have or a skill set they essentially don’t have. That’s kind of goofy. It’s the same way with hiring at every level — there’s got to be core competencies that a person’s got to have.”
Those competencies are determined by the HR department based on the application. Once you determine that someone has the necessary aptitude to do the job, then you look at their character.
“Then, within that pool of people who are valuable to you, you then come into the definition of what makes a competent, thorough professional, and that starts with integrity and character, because if a person has those kinds of core competencies, they can do anything,” Lewis says. “They can be trained to do any job. A person that’s flawed, you’re not going to get very far with.”
That’s part of the job of the interviewers — note the plural. Nobody can fool everyone, so you have to use a team of three or four people.
“You have to talk to a person and understand a person enough to get into who are they, what’s important to them, what is their makeup, what’s their moral makeup,” he says.
That comes down to asking job candidates the right questions.
“You have to have a person tell you about themselves,” Lewis says. “You have to have them explain to you their priorities in their life, and you have to have them talk to you about where they’ve been and the jobs they’ve had and why they left those positions. … It’s sort of a revelation of peeling the onion.”
He also asks them why they want to become a part of Family Heritage.
“If you listen carefully to what it is a person wants to do, their goals and objectives and their beliefs about themself and their vision for the future will pretty much come out when a person is given the opportunity to explain to you why they want to be here and why they want to be doing what you’re doing,” he says.
Ultimately, it comes down to how you see your interactions with the person in the future.
“When you make a hiring decision, you have to ask yourself, ‘Is this the kind of person I would want to be around, the kind of person I would want to personally know? Is this the kind of person I would want to spend time with? Could this person ever become a friend of mine or could I become a friend of theirs? Is the person the kind of person you want to affiliate with,’” he says. “And you’re pretty quickly able to assess it.”
He says to also look at their past.
“All of us build a track record, and if you get information from someone’s past that they’ve been unethical or dishonest, why would you want to work with a person like that?” he says.
It may be hard to initially get truthful information about a person, so when you ask someone where they worked previously, don’t accept just the company name as an answer. Probe further.
“I would say, ‘Who did you work with? Who was your manager? Who was your manager before that?’” Lewis says. “You have to be willing to invest in going through the background examination, because if you call [the company], they’re going to say, ‘She worked here from this to this,’ and in today’s world, that’s about all you can get.”
But if you call and talk to those people they mentioned or any other contacts you personally have at that company, you can begin to create a clearer picture of that person.
“You have to specifically ask, ‘Were there any kind of integrity or ethical issues with Mary or Bob? Why did they leave?’” Lewis says. “That normally is the real essence of what the deal is. When a person is no longer a part of a company, why did they leave? What does the company say? What does the applicant say? What did the people who worked with them have to say?”
It’s also critical to not settle just because you have an opening. If even one of the interviewers dissents about hiring a person, they slow down the process. The group discusses what that person saw versus what the others observed.
“Everybody meets people that they can’t connect to or relate to,” he says. “You then have to ask that person to have another conversation based on the data of the other three people. You ask that person to have a conversation with that person again, and everybody helps that person to figure out some lines of pursuit you should talk about. The one that’s dissenting might be the one that is right.”
If after that, there’s still concern, they may use professional assessments or send candidates to a professional psychologist.
“You can’t compromise in terms of what you’re looking for,” he says. “Your people are a reflection of who you are and what the company is. The company is a reflection of all of the parts of it, so if you settle for people just to hire people, you can’t be who you want to be, so you just have to be willing to make the hard choices of we’re going to pass on somebody.”
