Recruiting Tips

Recruiting Tips

My clients often complain that there is a lack of talent available for a particular position or they complain that they can’t afford A players. The problem often isn’t with the talent pool – it is with the selection expectations and requirements of the job. If for example, a company is recruiting for a sales rep who has successfully sold cardiac equipment in a specific territory, chances are you are not going to be able to find someone with these specific skills. Even if you do steal a candidate from a competitor, you may have just acquired your competitor’s weak link.  In my experience as a CEO, I always preferred to cast a wide net for positions. Casting a wider net however, requires organizations to do a number of things; these are:

1) Look for employees who desire to work. This may sound strange but many hiring managers agree that finding people who desire to actually show up and work is difficult.  In order to find this attribute, look for people who have a stable work history, meaning they have been with a particular company for extended periods of time and have possibly been promoted.  Steer clear of people who have a documented history of job hopping meaning 1 year or less at an employer without good cause.

2) Make sure the candidate is in agreement with your products or services. The last thing you want is someone who either does not care about your organization, its mission or has a moral or philosophical disagreement with the business itself. Such a person will be poison to your organization. You can weed out these criteria with a good interview. Ask specific example questions when you interview – “what is your view of hospitals? – how does that intersect with your current job?”

3) Find a candidate who has a track record of actually getting the job done.  Regardless of previous job titles, or specific industries they have worked in, what did the person accomplish? Were they able to meet objectives and multi-task? Did the organization progress? What do their peers say about them? Rather than saying you need an MBA level executive who has only worked for ASCs for the last 5 years, it is possible that there are many talented executive managers in industries such as home care, pharmacy or other industry segments that could easily transition into another arena with little coaching.

4) The ideal candidate is someone that would consider your opening a promotion. Companies too often get stuck recruiting someone who has done the exact same or similar position for the last 3 to 5 years. Why would anyone wish to do the same job, at the same level for greater than 3 to 5 years unless they are not the superstar that every company desires?  What you need is an employee who has a “stretch factor.” A stretch factor is someone who could perform the job with a little stretching of their talents, experience and skills.

Here are some great questions for interviews:

1. What are your long and short term career objectives?
2. What are your impressions of our industry, company, and this position?
3. What are your expectations for this role?
4. Tell me specifically how you would approach the first 90 days in this position.
5. What do you see as your strengths and weaknesses for this position? How would you shore up your weaknesses?
6. Tell about an instance in which you had to learn something very quickly.
7. Describe the most difficult project you’ve completed.
8. Under what types of conditions do you work best?
9. Which management style do you use? Which management style do you prefer in your manager?
10. What have you learned from your greatest employment failure?

I encourage organizations to reconsider their recruiting strategies and hiring processes. This requires being creative in your screening process, asking the right questions during an interview, checking a person’s reputation within their industry and seeking candidates that may not be the typical hire for positions. Make sure you have a candidate that has the ability to stretch themselves into highly successful team member. If your complaint is a lack of a talent pool, the problem could be that you have holes in the recruiting net and from this limited focus, you are excluding very talented individuals from your selection process. The last thing to consider is your budget – it may make sense to hire a younger or less experienced person who can stretch with a limited budget – or, hire a talented more expensive individual who can perform 1.5 to 2 job functions as either of these may be more cost-effective in the end.

Diagnosing and Solving Revenue Problems

Revenue is down – we aren’t hitting budget – how do we fix this issue? Marketing managers only have 5 basic tools in their “fix it box” – target markets, products and services, pricing, distribution and promotion. It is the job of any good marketing manager to figure out which one of these is the problem child and get a strategy and implementation plan back on track to pump up revenue. However, there is a bigger problem underneath that has to be examined in each of these areas – is it a problem with strategy or one with implementation?

In other words, your promotional strategy may make sense – your sales team just can’t implement it – or your advertising agency is failing to get the message across. It is essential to figure out which one of these is the real issue before you “retool” your marketing mix – and if it is a problem with both – then you have a real problem, much like the CEO of Netflix who had both a problem with strategy and implementation this week.

The best way to diagnose strategy issues is to take a look at each piece of the marketing mix and to test how it is playing out in the market. If your market research tells you that the strategy makes sense, then you most likely have an implementation problem. Strategy symptoms are actually pretty easy to diagnose. For example, if your sales team has had great success in the past and now they are complaining about sales, then you most likely need to look at your strategy.

Take a look at the economy, even in healthcare – surgeries are down, hospital bed days are lower as are visits to physicians – people just aren’t interested in paying their co-payments and deductibles. What have you done to work this fact into your marketing strategy?

Implementation problems are often harder to diagnose because sales cycles in healthcare can be long – especially if you are selling to a hospital system or a GPO. The marketing manager has to make sure the strategy is right by testing it – beta sites are great for testing – and make sure that the right people are in place to implement the strategy – and, they need to have the resources and authority to carry out the strategy. I was reminded of this very issue by one of the largest capital equipment companies in the world – their marketing strategy is basically sound, however, they so burden their sales team with paperwork, meetings and such that the actual time the team has to sell in the field has been falling steadily – all to satisfy corporate MBOs. You just can’t have this kind of implementation in today’s environment.

When you have a problem with both strategy and implementation – you can have an implosion – just like the CEO of Netflix had recently – what market research went into his strategy to separate streaming from home delivered movies and raise prices in an economy that needs to see more value to buy? Healthcare executives sometimes make the same mistakes – so before you go changing your marketing mix – figure out if you have a problem with strategy or implementation – and hopefully, you don’t have both.