In his 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, Scott A. Jones has learned a thing or two about finding the right people and putting
them in the right jobs. The inventor and entrepreneur launched ChaCha Search Inc. in 2006, a search engine with live human guides
aimed at taking a bite out of the market share of Google and Yahoo! It is the fifth technology-related company he has helped launch
since the mid-1980s; those companies total more than $50 million in annual revenue. When starting a new company, refocusing the
direction of an existing company or rebuilding a troubled company, Jones says the people you find and the power you give them will
ultimately determine your success. Smart Business spoke with Jones about how to find and enable employees who can make a
difference in your business.
Go beyond the skill set. One thing I always
say is when you’re bringing in members of
the team, they have to become part of the
family. As you’re bringing them in, A players are 10 times better than B players, and
B players are about 10 times better than C
players.
So an A player is literally about 100 times
better than a C player. And that shows up
not just in their skill sets, but in terms of
their interpersonal skills and their ability to
work on a team and get that effect of five
people on a team can really do the work of
10 if they’re really collaborating and working well together.
I consider the team skills, cooperation,
collaboration, to be every bit as important
as the skill set.
We have what we call a ‘New Worker
Inventory’ test. We’d give a skill test, say, if
it’s an engineer coming in. But we also give
this other test called the NWI that tests
things like teamwork, the ability to work
on a team, the ability to follow through. It’s
more of those intangible things that predict
whether this person will fit in with our
team.
We don’t score it like a pass or fail, but we
like to see the results of the test before we
walk in to an interview process. It kind of
tells us where to drill down. If that score’s
a bit low, we give them an opportunity to
take us through situations where they’ve
worked on a team before.
I find that when you get people to talk
about their projects, you really get to drill
down deeper, in detail how the project
played out, who was working on the team,
what worked and what didn’t, where were
the snags in this particular process. People
are sometimes surprised at the level of
detail that I drill down on a particular thing,
but you often find out some really important stuff by doing that.
Identify the intangibles. Identifying a person’s intangibles is what is happening in
the (interview) session. Things like eye
contact; when you are having the conversation, are they trying to dominate, or are they listening?
You really try to tune in to the subtle
things, the body language, that is going on
during the interview process. That can be
extraordinarily helpful. I also find that having multiple people in on the interview
process is essential because everyone gets
a different take, and you get to see what the
chemistry is like among multiple people.
The technique I’m talking about might
seem normal or ordinary, where you ask
questions to dig in to somebody’s past, but
I tend to take it beyond the level of other
interviewers I’ve seen at other companies
or even here.
I’ve had people come here and watch me
interview, and they say it is very striking
the level to which I drill down. I’ll ask who
exactly was on your team, who did you
like, who didn’t you like, why, what went
right about the project, what didn’t? We’ll
get into detail about it. What happened to
that customer you were meeting with, why
didn’t you get the sales you really wanted?
I might spend 20 minutes on half a sentence of their resume that might have triggered me to drill down. I’m trying to find
the situation that is equivalent to the one
they’re going to be in here in this company.
Find superstars to carry the load. As a
CEO, one of my most important jobs is to back up and see the forest, even though we
deal with the trees a lot. One of the best
ways to accomplish that is to bring on
superstars who can handle the day to day.
I’ve worked very hard at the recruiting
side of the equation to find people that are
much better than I would be at their particular roles in the company. Then I’ll spend
the time I need to take care of the day-today affairs, but they’ll carry the load.
Then I reserve time for myself to think
things over, and actually, sometimes,
schedule it. I’ll reserve some time and drive
off to a park and look around for a while,
just to make sure I’m not in the middle of
the war.
I need to get outside that so I can think
clearly about, strategically, what should we
be doing here? Other things I’ll do is I’ll
spend a few hours every few days surfing
the Internet, not necessarily drilling down
on any particular point, but kind of an
unguided searching expedition, just to see
what is going on in the industry. I try to put
myself in situations that are new and different and abnormal that might give me
some new perspective on what strategy
should look like.
If you stay in the same rut every day,
you’re not likely to put yourself in the
same context of where the world is going.
You have to feed and nurture that side of
things, and that’s not trained in college.
How do you really get out of the box in a
way that gets you to think about things
differently?
Challenge people to think. The best way to
challenge people is by example. You take
them through it a few times, and they start
to know what you’re going to walk in and
say when the meeting begins, that I’m
going to challenge them as to how might
we get this thing done. I use a variety of
techniques and creativity to get it done, but
I’ll bring it to the table in various situations
in my companies.
HOW TO REACH: ChaCha Search Inc., www.chacha.com or
Scott A. Jones, www.scottajones.com