Hire good people
With 1,000 locations around the world and 500 in his divisional region, Rotman can’t possibly handle everything himself, so he has to rely on his people to do things the right way in each of those places. But you’ll never be able to rely on those people if you’re not smart about the hiring process, which starts with identifying the characteristics you need from people on your team.
“One is people skills,” he says. “They need to be able to lead their own teams and also they need to be able to engage clients, which are all different. There’s no one client that has the same needs or the same social skills. You need to be able to work with different people.”
It’s also critical that his people are able to create a friendly and sociable business environment so the different office clients can interact together and feel like they’re part of a larger business. Then he wants people who can drive results.
“At the end, it’s a business, and we want our clients to stay with us, and that they would consider this a great value, and we have objectives for our people,” Rotman says. “We want them to be eager to get to those targets all the time.”
These aren’t just economic targets either — he wants 100 percent customer satisfaction, so his employees have to be committed to achieving that goal.
Then lastly he wants people who are able to multitask. On any given day in any center, his employees may be dealing with clients who have permanent offices there, others who may be using just the videoconferencing features, others who are using the meeting rooms for the day, and then others who may just be in town for a set period of time and are using the facilities for a short time.
“All of that requires people to be able to handle all different kinds of clients at the same time in a high-traffic center,” Rotman says. “Those are characteristics that make my people successful and make Regus successful.”
While it’s nice to identify what characteristics you need in your team, you also have to do a good job of identifying those in the interview process, which is a bit trickier to do.
“We have a prearranged questionnaire that we ask people to fill out for us, even before we start the interview process,” he says. “The way they answer those questions helps us understand if that person is the right fit or not for us to continue interviewing, so there is some basic psychoanalysis question that forces us to ask if this is the right candidate or not in the questionnaire.”
Assuming the questionnaire comes back with what he’s looking for, then it’s on to in-person interviews. Some of the things he looks for in people to know if they’ll have the qualities that he wants is what industries they’ve worked in before. Most don’t have the same experience because of Regus’ unique business model, but if they’ve worked in lodging or the rental car business, he knows that they have the skills that match his business.
Rotman has set questions he has people ask in the interviews, so that they’re all being asked the same things, such as describe a typical day or week in your most recent position, if you ran your own company, describe the culture you would promote, how do you manage your sales pipeline, and think back to the last time you lost a deal, what was the situation? What could you have done differently?
The interviews are also done by more than one person.
“We know that we have key people in the company, it depends on the position, that are good at interviewing and sensing people,” he says. “We like to have three people for every candidate that interviews them so that [the candidate] can sense the culture that we have.”
