There are many ways to fail. When it happens, in spite of all the planning, management and individual-effort put forth to avoid failure, we should embrace the opportunity to learn from it.
When it comes to building your organization to achieve results, there is one sure way to fail. It is also a sure way to not achieve corporate goals. Hire with a sense of urgency, focused on ability attitude and fit. If you don’t, you won’t have the people to do the necessary work to achieve corporate goals and results.
Personally, I dislike failure. When I encounter failure, either in discussions with clients or among my own team and projects, my brain automatically goes into post-mortem analysis.
I can’t help looking for a root cause, in that first triage to understand how to recover from, and prevent, failure in the future.
Root causes seem to fall in five categories. All companies balance time, capital resources, management and leadership to ensure operational success, but it is human resources – the people and teams you need to achieve results, that seems not to get the attention it deserves.
Time is a simple construct that frames the begin and end, or when something starts, and the target that same something should be completed.
Capital resources are the corporate financial means that budgets and funds raw materials, operational costs, and cost of labor.
Management is guiding and enabling teams and individuals along a path of doing things right.
Leadership is setting the vision of the future for doing the right things.
Human resources are the individual people that make up teams necessary to achieve the vision set by leadership.
These constructs are all interdependent. Assuming you have capital resources, good management and leadership to do what your company is going to do, the one remaining factor that can be controlled is hiring and engaging the right human resources early enough to ensure success. Time is constant and can only pass, and is lost forever once passed. If as time passes you don’t have the people in place required to achieve results on any time scale, capital resources drain, productivity drops, and the vision is not attained.
Survive this quandary by enabling hiring with a sense of realistic urgency. Avoid a hiring approach that eliminates candidates for the wrong, or unrealistic, reasons.
Performance-based hiring looks for people that fit these three criteria:
- Ability: They can do the job.
- Attitude: They want to do the job.
- Fit: They want to work for you at your enterprise.
Focus on aptitude and ability when hiring and transferability of existing skills and past experience. Focus on inquisitiveness, willingness and interest in learning new things that shows desire to work and grow. Examine how the candidate engages with other people, environment and experiences to learn how they will fit into the culture in your organization.
Too often, we are looking for the proverbial purple squirrel that doesn’t exist. Instead, hiring managers, lead by human resources professionals can help their employers achieve corporate goals by being an enabler to hiring with a sense of urgency over a hiring process that focuses on eliminating candidates.
Barton Professional Placement Group is here to help you hire with a sense of urgency. Our goal as a search and placement firm is to enable our clients to achieve results, attain corporate goals and avoid failure.
We show our clients how to enable people with ability and attitude to achieve results – regardless of what their past experience. Getting the work done, is far more effective at avoiding failure through a lack of urgency in an enabling hiring process. Call us today to collaborate and learn more.
