***The Art of Hiring the Best

Ask most business leaders what the real key to their long-term success is and they’ll tell you it’s their people. You can operate in a hot market, use the most cutting-edge technology, or have a competitive product concept, but without the ability to hire and keep the right amount of passionate and intelligent people in your company your business will never truly grow.

Yes, with all the time and thought that’s spent on vision and strategy, it’s people--talented human beings--that are the ultimate competitive advantage in today’s business landscape. People implement. People execute. Building a successful business is a lot like participating in a long race. And hiring the best people will give your business the traction it needs to get started and keep going turn after turn.

So, does hiring the best mean spending the most? Not necessarily. You don’t always “get what you pay for.” Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball chronicled and analyzed how Billy Beane transformed the Oakland A’s baseball team from a low-winning marginal club into a high-winning division champion--all with the second lowest payroll in baseball. When averaging the payroll out over the number of wins between 1999 and 2001, it cost the Oakland A’s about $500,000 per win, while other teams were winning fewer games than the A’s were and paying millions for each one.

How did Beane do it? He looked for the players that the other teams passed on, or more specifically, the players that the other teams didn’t recognize as valuable based on traditional criteria. Beane knew that he couldn’t build a team the way, for example, the Yankees build a team. If he did it that way he would lose because the Yankees were spending three times more than he could. So Beane needed to recalibrate his hiring strategy. He had to find new players and career vets the market had “undervalued.” Beane was convinced that savvy talent-picking could beat big budgets.

Beane proved that a solid grasp of value pays off. When you understand how much a position is worth to you and you know how much you can and are willing to pay to fill it then you can go a long way towards zeroing in on what your hiring priorities should be. Knowing the value that you’re looking for in a candidate will help keep you from being blinded by his or her charisma and shiny resume.

Don’t just hire people who look like the best. Before you meet with a candidate, do some homework on them and learn some things that aren’t covered in their resume. Why? If you’re going to pay someone to do something, you should at least know how good they are--which means knowing as much as you can about their hits and their misses. Best does not mean perfect or flawless. Even the best person for a position has room for improvement. And that talented but imperfect person is the one that you’ll be working with on a day-to-day basis, not the slick interview machine that you met with for 20 minutes.

How do you separate the wannabes from the winners? You can start by rethinking your next job posting. Give careful consideration to how you define the critical skills that will set the virtuosos apart from the hacks. Then, make the interview more rigorous. Don’t let it turn into a staged press conference for the candidate. Give them a real-world challenge or opportunity to chew on. Ask yourself whether they actually offered any substantive ideas that they could realistically implement today? Getting a feel for a candidate's reasoning and overall thought process is one of the best ways to weed out the A players from the B and C players.

Questions to ask yourself during the interview: Are the candidate’s responses more tha
I expected? Do they address the test situation, but also offer an unexpected fresh perspective (that actually makes sense)?

After the interview, use charts and grids to rank the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. This doesn’t need to be a complex or elaborate process, but the more you can apply an objective and systematic approach to hiring, the more precise your evaluation of each candidate’s potential will be.

The bottom line of Beane’s success with rebuilding the Oakland A’s was his readiness to look at his business from a different angle, which meant redefining who exactly the best was for his team.

In business, the more defined your hiring criteria is the easier it will be for you to identify the best from the rest.