Who summary

Would you consider hiring an unlicensed contractor to remodel your kitchen? Probably not. After all, there’s no way to know whether she has the skills necessary to complete the job. By the same token, you shouldn’t hire people without knowing precisely what qualifications they need to succeed. To do that, you must define your hiring needs.

Recruiters often forget to define exactly what it is they're looking for – a lapse that can derail the entire hiring process. Indeed, it’s crucial to know exactly what you want right from the get-go.

Intellect and smarts alone won’t make an employee great. She needs to have social skills, too, something recruiters would do well to keep in mind.

But to truly ensure that new hires fit in, you also need to know what the culture of your company is. In fact, one-third of the CEOs that the authors interviewed while preparing this book admitted that they’d made massive hiring mistakes by writing off the importance of a cultural fit.

Plenty of billion-dollar firms consider hiring to be one of their most important business operations. But despite this fact, for most companies, it’s not a continuous process.

That’s because traditional hiring methods only look for new employees when they’re needed, which is a major error. After all, with the clock ticking, the hiring team is under intense pressure to find someone – and fast. This makes it more likely that they’ll hire the wrong person.

When sussing out candidates, interviews are crucial – and knowing how to structure them is even more important. That’s why, to ensure that your hiring decisions hit the mark, you should use a four-interview system.

Each of these interviews will build on the others, increasing in precision as the process advances. Implementing this system will require effort and dedication, but it will be worth it in the end, as you’ll be much more likely to find the perfect match for the specific role you’re filling.

The screening interview will narrow the field, but you’ll have a way to go before you select your ideal candidate. The next step is to unearth relevant facts about these promising candidates and the who interview is your tool to do so.

This second interview is more in-depth, the goal being to find out who the candidate really is. It’s based on a method pioneered by Brad Smart, the father of one of the authors. Here’s how he came up with it:

Imagine how frustrating it would be to conduct four interviews with a perfect candidate, only for him to walk out the door. It would be a huge letdown, but you can make sure it doesn’t happen by selling the candidate on the job.

That means convincing him that the job fits both his skills and personality. After all, employees want to be set up for success and the better a job fits their skills and style, the more likely they are to flourish.

Management experts and CEOs agree that bringing on talented employees is the single most important facet of building a successful company. But to make hiring all-star candidates a part of your company culture, you’ll have to lay out a clear process.

First, you need to make clear to your management team that people are your top priority. This is essential. Indeed, successful managers interviewed by the authors said that they spend up to 60 percent of their time thinking about their current and future employees.