Find the right talent
MED3000 continues to add employees each month, and Hampson still uses the basic principle he started the company with: Hire smarter.
“To grow to $300 million, you still need to get people who can continue to bring ideas to the table and help analyze the marketplace and continue with re-engineering yourself and reinventing yourself, so you can continue to grow a company versus get stagnate and flat,” Hampson says.
Hiring smarter means you bring on board people with their own opinions and sometimes their own vision. The first thing you need to do is make sure you have confidence in your own abilities, your knowledge of the industry and your vision of where you plan to take the company. At the same time, you need to be open to listening to opinions that may change your mind on the company’s fundamentals.
“You really don’t want a lot of people just telling you what you want to hear because you’re not always right,” Hampson says.
Besides, isn’t the whole purpose of hiring smarter to bring in alternative viewpoints and experiences that will better your company?
“It’s like in basketball having free agents: You hire a bunch of great athletes, and then you try to make sure that these are great athletes that can work within a team concept,” Hampson says. “You basically try to hire smart people who can work within a team and who really want to move the company first and their careers and themselves second.”
From the onset, Hampson hired people with better credentials than his own and who possessed a belief in his vision and his culture for the company. That allowed him to focus on the vision, while the rest of the team built the company’s infrastructure.
Once you’re comfortable with the fact that you’ll need to accept other’s ideas, you need to find the right employee match. Hampson recommends first using your extended network of contacts.
“You try to get out into the community, you try to get into different situations where you meet other executives, even competitors,” Hampson says. “Then you work hard trying to get a relationship with those people. Get to know them on a nonbusiness aspect, and then, over time, you try to recruit them to the vision. It’s usually a pretty good process because they know who you are and where you’re going because they spend a lot of time with you.”
Whether or not you’ve built a relationship with the person, the way you go about the interview process is critical. Hampson places a large emphasis on listening instead of talking. Basically, allow the person time to interview you.
“We do a bidirectional interview where we’re interviewing them but they’re also interviewing us,” he says. “It’s important to listen and let the candidate do a lot of talking about what their vision is, what their goals and objectives are for themselves, and let them tell you what they would do if they were CEO. If you give the opportunity to people to really speak and feel comfortable in that environment of telling you their ideas, you really pick up a lot of good information, but you also pick up which candidates are the ones that fit your culture versus the ones that don’t.”
If you’re recruiting employees into a team-oriented culture — one that emphasizes building relationships and company first — the best indication of whether they’ll fit is if their answers include a desire to learn rather than teach. At the same time, Hampson says don’t gloss over the obvious such as indications on their resume that they’re a team player, their participation in team sports or maybe involvement in the community.
Also, take the face-to-face time to outline your vision for the company and see how they respond. Hampson lets interviewees know upfront that MED3000 is trying to grow from the bottom up and that the company is looking for entrepreneurs with a vision that can move them forward.
“At MED3000 if you have a job description and you want to be in a box with limitations of what you do, you probably wouldn’t be successful here,” Hampson says. “But if you’re a person who can work in a matrix environment and take a step back and try and figure out what you need to do on a daily basis for the best of the company versus what’s just in your job description, then you’ll be successful in our organization.”
