Hiring and Firing (The Brian Tracy Success Library)

by Brian Tracy

Never rely solely on your own judgment.

Have the person interviewed by at least three others whose opinions you respect.

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

David McClelland, the Harvard psychologist and author of The Achieving Society,

the need for individual accomplishment.

someone who enjoys being a part of a team,

individual who enjoys organizing, coordinating, and motivating a group of people to accomplish a task.

leader motivated to do everything possible to get results through other people.

what achievements were most responsible for their greatest sense of personal pride and satisfaction.

Ask candidates what experience they have that they think qualifies them to do the job that you have explained.

Check her track record carefully and grill her on what she’s done in the past.

From experience, employers have discovered that resumes are usually inaccurate, sometimes professionally produced, and often dishonest or misleading.

“Would you hire this person back again?”

The Fatal Flaw

The more questions he asked in his casual, non-threatening way, the more vital pieces of information he acquired that enabled him to solve cases.

You need to be sure that the people you are considering are exactly what they appear to be. It is much, much harder to deal with people once you have hired them than it is to make the decision not to hire them in the first place.

“Do I like this person?” Never hire somebody that you do not personally like.

“Would I be comfortable inviting this person to my home to have Sunday dinner with my family?”

this the sort of person that you would invite to your home, to sit with your family at dinner and to engage in family conversation?

It is important to trust this “still, small voice.” It will seldom lead you astray.

The person he was talking to immediately asked, “Are you going to make a decision as important as this by flipping a coin?” Freud replied, “When I flip a coin to decide yes or no, it is when the coin is in the air that I know the answer. When the coin is in the air, I know how I want it to land.”

Another question you can ask yourself is: “Would I like to spend twenty years working with this person?”

You must always pick people that you feel comfortable with and positive about, almost to the point that you would want them to be members of your family, both in the office and at home.

a graduate course in personnel selection,

that the individual really wanted to work with this company, and to work nowhere else.

Say something like, “You seem like a pretty good person. It seems like this job might be a good fit for you. Why don’t you think it over for a while and call me in a couple of days and tell me what you think.”

practice “reverse psychology,”

“Opportunities and people for jobs are like buses. There will always be another one that comes along. You don’t have to run after them and you don’t have to worry. Always go slowly when you make long-term decisions.”

If people try to pressure you by saying that they need a decision right away because they have another job offer, you simply say, “Okay, you should take the other job offer.” If a candidate is willing to accept the most immediate offer that’s available, that person will probably not work out for you in the long term.

“Why do you want to work here?”

You then ask, “Specifically, how do you feel you could contribute?”

“If you were to get this job, what would be the first thing you would want to do? Where would you want to start, based on everything that I’ve told you?”

SALARY NEGOTIATIONS, like all negotiations, require that you get as much information as possible before you begin.

Your goal is to determine how much the job should pay and to get the person to take the job at the lowest possible price, at least initially.

Usually, people’s financial comfort levels will be within a range, and your goal is to pay them toward the bottom of that range and then offer them increases based on performance.

My point is that if you have hired truly excellent people, forget about ninety-day job reviews and increase their pay immediately. The most expensive person in the world of work is a highly talented person who you allow to be hired away by someone else for a few dollars more.

In Economics 101,

Most companies and managers have onboarding plans for new hires, especially expensive and important new employees. But even if you are starting an administrative assistant or receptionist, it is absolutely essential that you have a plan, a checklist, of exactly your process for quickly getting this person up to speed.

Assign Them to Top People

If you do not have the time to work closely with new employees, assign them to one of your best people.

If you assign a new employee to a person who does not work very hard or well, or who is negative and complaining, the new employee will adopt these behaviors and this mind-set from the very beginning. This is not what you had in mind.

What companies have found is that even ten years after their hiring, if employees are started off right, with intense training with top people in their first few weeks and months, they are far, far ahead of other people who started at the same time but who did not get the initial high-quality, hands-on training and treatment.

70 percent of companies do no sales training at all. They do what is called “product training,” and they think that this is the same as teaching people how to approach and interact with a prospective customer.

The best companies start their new people with intense training, like the Marine Corps, to make sure that their new people become excellent and important contributors to the company for the long term.

The best companies are those that take the onboarding process very seriously.

Develop a written plan for exactly what you will do to start a new employee off right.

Pile the work on right from the beginning and give them plenty of feedback and help.

The best news was that I learned more in those two unbroken years of work than I might have learned in ten or twenty years working for a company at a slower pace.

On the first day on the job, the new employee is most open to new possibilities and new challenges. Take advantage of this positive attitude.

Welcome the new employee as a new member of your corporate family, and then bury them in work.