KeenHire Blog by Margaret Graziano

Should You Hire People Smarter Than You?

It's one of the pieces of wisdom you read in business magazines.

     Hire people smarter than you.

You hear it from motivational speakers, successful entrepreneurs, and people who like to give advice on any topic.  "The secret of my success was hiring people smarter than me."  But is that true?

If that were really true, than the dumbest person in any corporation would be the CEO.  While some people may snicker behind their hands when they read that, most of us know that it's just not true.  So what's the behind the myth?  What does it really mean to hire someone smarter than you?  And does Corporate America follow it?

What Does Donald Trump Think?
"Management -- Donald fought the platitude pattern and said "You want to be smarter than your people." He thought the notion that you should hire people smarter than you was a poor one."

800-CEO-Read (The CEO Blog) has Bob Rosen weigh in:
"One of the most important aspects of being a leader is hiring people smarter than you. That’s why top leaders spend more time putting the right team in place to accomplish their objectives than they spend on planning, strategizing, or many other components of their job."

Small Business Bloggers Like Staff Writers Better Than The Top Guy:
"Skellie is a young writer who he hired in late 2007 to be Problogger’s first staff writer. I don’t know what it is about her that makes the writing better than his; it just is to me. Now, you may think this is a dig against Darren Rowse, but is it not—in fact, this is praise. The reason why I give kudos to Darren Rowse is because he is a very talented writer and yet he managed to find someone who is more talented than he is. I think that hiring people who have a high level of talent is the mark of strong leadership, forward thinking, and a commitment to quality."

And this Kiwi (New Zealander) buys into the notion:
"When we recruit new staff we encourage managers to hire people who are smarter than they are, with more energy and better ideas."

So maybe that isn't indicative of Corporate America, but Google ranks them the highest, and it brings a nice cross section of opinion.  But what does it mean.   Should we be shelling out IQ tests to candidates, and hire the ones who beat us?  Should we challenge our employees to Sudoku matches, with the winners getting a set of steakknives and the losers pink slips?

Hiring People Is Job Number One

Ask any entrepreneur what keeps them up at night, and their answer will be "hiring the right people."  The composition of your staff is the single biggest predictor of your success as a business owner, but it's also one of the most misunderstood areas.

I was reading yesterday some study (and I forget who sent it to me) that said that adding an interview to the employment process improved your chances of getting the right person by 2%.  That seems blasphemous when everyone you know got their job because of an interview, but the truth is that interviews are given by people not trained in interviewing, and interviews are performed by people not trained in acing an interview.

Gut feel is the culprit, and it's something that's universal.  Universally wrong, that is.  That's one of the reasons I teach benchmarking.  So much of what we assume about hiring is bad knowledge passed on from generation to generation.  It wasn't that along ago that staffing firms hired young men based on the shoes they were wearing or depending on whether they played a sport in college (that's no joke - those are real people interviewing with those questions).

For me, the need to hire the right people transformed my thinking about hiring.  My job was to hire the right people for my client, but when I looked at my internal staff, it was clear that I wasn't getting what I wanted.  So I started to look around for what drove interview success.  When I found the answers, which involve benchmarking, personality assessments, and behavioral interviewing, I applied them to my own internal hires.

And then it hit me. If it works for me, it will absolutely work for my clients. And the idea for KeenHire was born.  So when I call you on the phone, I'm not selling something because a boss decided to push a product on their salespeople. I'm selling something I believe in because it worked for me.

Hiring the right people is the most important job you have, as an owner or as a manager. What are you doing to make sure you're doing that job right? 

Call me.  Margaret Graziano.  1-888-Keen-Hire.

Sins of Omission In The Land Of Opportunity

In today’s volatile world, paying the price to live and work in the land of the free and the home of the brave means full disclosure.

Full disclosure you ask?

It means letting it all hang out, telling the truth, not lying or faking about your background, accomplishments, experience or employment intentions.

Being 100% responsible for who you are and what you bring to the table.

What is a lie?
What is considered a lie?
What is a sin of omission and is it worse than a sin of co-mission?

As I lead workshops for the unemployed on how to Ace the Interview, a chronic complaint under the guise of a question always seems to emerge out of the participant’s job hunt frustration. That complaint is, “Why do these employers make us job applicants jump through flaming hoops of fire just to go to work for their company?  Aren’t they grateful we applied?  They need us.  After all there is a talent shortage out there!”

Over the years my response hasn’t changed, “Aren’t you asking them to pay you each week, aren’t you asking them to give you an opportunity to work? Furthermore, why you would event want to go work for a company that in this day in age did not take hiring as a serious matter?”