by Jason Fried
The right time to hire is when there’s more work than you can handle for a sustained period of time. There should be things you can’t do anymore. You should notice the quality level slipping. That’s when you’re hurting. And that’s when it’s time to hire, not earlier.
Pass on great people
Some companies are addicted to hiring. Some even hire when they aren’t hiring. They’ll hear about someone great and invent a position or title just to lure them in. And there they’ll sit—parked in a position that doesn’t matter, doing work that isn’t important.
Pass on hiring people you don’t need, even if you think that person’s a great catch. You’ll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.
Problems start when you have more people than you need. You start inventing work to keep everyone busy. Artificial work leads to artificial projects. And those artificial projects lead to real costs and complexity.
Don’t worry about “the one that got away.” It’s much worse to have people on staff who aren’t doing anything meaningful. There’s plenty of talent out there. When you do have a real need, you’ll find someone who fits well.
Great has nothing to do with it. If you don’t need someone, you don’t need someone.
Strangers at a cocktail party
If you go to a cocktail party where everyone is a stranger, the conversation is dull and stiff. You make small talk about the weather, sports, TV shows, etc. You shy away from serious conversations and controversial opinions.
A small, intimate dinner party among old friends is a different story, though. There are genuinely interesting conversations and heated debates. At the end of the night, you feel you actually got something out of it.
Hire a ton of people rapidly and a “strangers at a cocktail party” problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around, so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, “This idea sucks.” People appease instead of challenge.
And that appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. If that doesn’t happen, you start churning out something that doesn’t offend anyone but also doesn’t make anyone fall in love.
You need an environment where everyone feels safe enough to be honest when things get tough. You need to know how far you can push someone. You need to know what people really mean when they say something.
So hire slowly. It’s the only way to avoid winding up at a cocktail party of strangers.
Resumés are ridiculous
We all know resumés are a joke. They’re exaggerations. They’re filled with “action verbs” that don’t mean anything. They list job titles and responsibilities that are vaguely accurate at best. And there’s no way to verify most of what’s on there. The whole thing is a farce.
Worst of all, they’re too easy. Anyone can create a decent-enough resumé. That’s why half-assed applicants love them so much. They can shotgun out hundreds at a time to potential employers. It’s another form of spam. They don’t care about landing your job; they just care about landing any job.
If someone sends out a resumé to three hundred companies, that’s a huge red flag right there. There’s no way that applicant has researched you. There’s no way he knows what’s different about your company.
If you hire based on this garbage, you’re missing the point of what hiring is about. You want a specific candidate who cares specifically about your company, your products, your customers, and your job.
So how do you find these candidates? First step: Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance. There’s no way an applicant can churn out hundreds of personalized letters. That’s why the cover letter is a much better test than a resumé. You hear someone’s actual voice and are able recognize if it’s in tune with you and your company.
Trust your gut reaction. If the first paragraph sucks, the second has to work that much harder. If there’s no hook in the first three, it’s unlikely there’s a match there. On the other hand, if your gut is telling you there’s a chance at a real match, then move on to the interview stage.
Years of irrelevance
We’ve all seen job ads that say, “Five years of experience required.” That may give you a number, but it tells you nothing.
Of course, requiring some baseline level of experience can be a good idea when hiring. It makes sense to go after candidates with six months to a year of experience. It takes that long to internalize the idioms, learn how things work, understand the relevant tools, etc.
But after that, the curve flattens out. There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.
How do you really measure this stuff anyway? What does five years of experience mean? If you spent a couple of weekends experimenting with something a few years back, can you count that as a year of experience? How is a company supposed to verify these claims? These are murky waters.
How long someone’s been doing it is overrated. What matters is how well they’ve been doing it.
Forget about formal education
I have never let my schooling
interfere with my education.
—MARK TWAIN
There are plenty of companies out there who have educational requirements. They’ll only hire people with a college degree (sometimes in a specific field) or an advanced degree or a certain GPA or certification of some sort or some other requirement.
Come on. There are plenty of intelligent people who don’t excel in the classroom. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need someone from one of the “best” schools in order to get results. Ninety percent of CEOs currently heading the top five hundred American companies did not receive undergraduate degrees from Ivy League colleges. In fact, more received their undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin than from Harvard (the most heavily represented Ivy school, with nine CEOs).*
Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. Take writing, for example. When you get out of school, you have to unlearn so much of the way they teach you to write there. Some of the misguided lessons you learn in academia:
The longer a document is, the more it matters.
Stiff, formal tone is better than being conversational.
Using big words is impressive.
You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point.
The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write.
It’s no wonder so much business writing winds up dry, wordy, and dripping with nonsense. People are just continuing the bad habits they picked up in school. It’s not just academic writing, either. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren’t worth much outside of it.
Bottom line: The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who completed college with a stellar GPA. Consider dropouts, people who had low GPAs, community-college students, and even those who just went to high school.
Everybody works
With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone’s got to be producing. No one can be above the work.
That means you need to avoid hiring delegators, those people who love telling others what to do. Delegators are dead weight for a small team. They clog the pipes for others by coming up with busywork. And when they run out of work to assign, they make up more—regardless of whether it needs to be done.
Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator’s best friend. That’s where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.
Hire managers of one
Managers of one are people who com
e up with their own goals and execute them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do—set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc.—but they do it by themselves and for themselves.
These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of hand-holding or supervision.
How can you spot these people? Look at their backgrounds. They have set the tone for how they’ve worked at other jobs. They’ve run something on their own or launched some kind of project.
You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. Finding these people frees the rest of your team to work more and manage less.
Hire great writers
If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off.
That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing. Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. Great writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.
Writing is making a comeback all over our society. Look at how much people e-mail and text-message now rather than talk on the phone. Look at how much communication happens via instant messaging and blogging. Writing is today’s currency for good ideas.
The best are everywhere
It’s crazy not to hire the best people just because they live far away. Especially now that there’s so much technology out there making it easier to bring everyone together online.
Our headquarters are in Chicago, but more than half of our team lives elsewhere. We’ve got people in Spain, Canada, Idaho, Oklahoma, and elsewhere. Had we limited our search only to people in Chicago, we would have missed out on half of the great people we have.
To make sure your remote team stays in touch, have at least a few hours a day of real-time overlap. Working in time zones where there’s no workday overlap at all is tough. If you face that situation, someone might need to shift hours a bit so they start a little later or earlier in the day, so you’re available at the same time. You don’t need eight hours of overlap, though. (Actually, we’ve found it preferable to not have complete overlap—you get more alone time that way.) Two to four hours of overlap should be plenty.
Also, meet in person once in a while. You should see each other at least every few months. We make sure our whole team gets together a few times a year. These are great times to review progress, discuss what’s going right or wrong, plan for the future, and get reacquainted with one another on a personal level.
Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent, regardless of where it is.
Test-drive employees
Interviews are only worth so much. Some people sound like pros but don’t work like pros. You need to evaluate the work they can do now, not the work they say they did in the past.
The best way to do that is to actually see them work. Hire them for a miniproject, even if it’s for just twenty or forty hours. You’ll see how they make decisions. You’ll see if you get along. You’ll see what kind of questions they ask. You’ll get to judge them by their actions instead of just their words.
You can even make up a fake project. In a factory in South Carolina, BMW built a simulated assembly line where job candidates get ninety minutes to perform a variety of work-related tasks.*
Cessna, the airplane manufacturer, has a role-playing exercise for prospective managers that simulates the day of an executive. Candidates work through memos, deal with (phony) irate customers, and handle other problems. Cessna has hired more than a hundred people using this simulation.†
These companies have realized that when you get into a real work environment, the truth comes out. It’s one thing to look at a portfolio, read a resumé, or conduct an interview. It’s another to actually work with someone.
*Carol Hymowitz, “Any College Will Do,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 18, 2006, online.wsj.com/article/SB115853818747665842.html
*Peter Carbonara, “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill,” Fast Company, Dec. 18, 2007, www.fastcompany.com/magazine/04/hiring.html
†Ibid.
CHAPTER
DAMAGE CONTROL
Own your bad news
When something goes wrong, someone is going to tell the story. You’ll be better off if it’s you. Otherwise, you create an opportunity for rumors, hearsay, and false information to spread.
When something bad happens, tell your customers (even if they never noticed in the first place). Don’t think you can just sweep it under the rug. You can’t hide anymore. These days, someone else will call you on it if you don’t do it yourself. They’ll post about it online and everyone will know. There are no more secrets.
People will respect you more if you are open, honest, public, and responsive during a crisis. Don’t hide behind spin or try to keep your bad news on the down low. You want your customers to be as informed as possible.
Back in 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Exxon made the mistake of waiting a long time before responding to the spill and sending aid to Alaska. Exxon’s chairman failed to go there until two weeks after the spill. The company held news briefings in Valdez, a remote Alaskan town that was difficult for the press to reach. The result: a PR disaster for Exxon that led the public to believe the company was either hiding something or didn’t really care about what had happened.*
Contrast that Exxon story to the rupture of an Ashland Oil storage tank that spilled oil into a river near Pittsburgh around the same time. Ashland Oil’s chairman, John Hall, went to the scene of the Ashland spill and took charge. He pledged to clean everything up. He visited news bureaus to explain what the company would do and answer any questions. Within a day, he had shifted the story from a rotten-oil-company-does-evil narrative to a good-oil-company-tries-to-clean-up story. †
Here are some tips on how you can own the story:
The message should come from the top. The highest-ranking person available should take control in a forceful way.
Spread the message far and wide. Use whatever megaphone you have. Don’t try to sweep it under the rug.
“No comment” is not an option.
Apologize the way a real person would and explain what happened in detail.
Honestly be concerned about the fate of your customers—then prove it.
Speed changes everything
“Your call is very important to us. We appreciate your patience. The average hold time right now is sixteen minutes.” Give me a fucking break.
Getting back to people quickly is probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service. It’s amazing how much that can defuse a bad situation and turn it into a good one.
Have you ever sent an e-mail and it took days or weeks for the company to get back to you? How did it make you feel? These days, that’s what people have come to expect. They’re used to being put on hold. They’re used to platitudes about “caring” that aren’t backed up.
That’s why so many support queries start off with an antagonistic tone. Some people may even make threats or call you names. Don’t take it personally. They think that’s the only way to be heard. They’re only trying to be a squeaky wheel in hopes it’ll get them a little grease.
Once you answer quickly, they shift 180 degrees. They light up. They become extra polite. Often they thank you profusely.
It’s especially true if you offer a personal response. Customers are so used to canned answers, you can really differentiate yourself by answering thoughtfully and showing that you’re listening. And even if you don’t have a perfect answer, say something. “Let me do some research
and get back to you” can work wonders.
How to say you’re sorry
There’s never really a great way to say you’re sorry, but there are plenty of terrible ways.
One of the worst ways is the non-apology apology, which sounds like an apology but doesn’t really accept any blame. For example, “We’re sorry if this upset you.” Or “I’m sorry that you don’t feel we lived up to your expectations.” Whatever.
A good apology accepts responsibility. It has no conditional if phrase attached. It shows people that the buck stops with you. And then it provides real details about what happened and what you’re doing to prevent it from happening again. And it seeks a way to make things right.
Here’s another bad one: “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.” Oh, please. Let’s break down why that’s bad:
“We apologize …” If you spilled coffee on someone while riding the subway, would you say, “I apologize”? No, you’d say, “I’m so, so sorry!” Well, if your service is critical to your customers, an interruption to that service is like spilling hot coffee all over them. So use the appropriate tone and language to show that you understand the severity of what happened. Also, the person in charge should take personal responsibility. An “I” apology is a lot stronger than a “we” apology.
“… any inconvenience …” If customers depend on your service and can’t get to it, it’s not merely an inconvenience. It’s a crisis. An inconvenience is a long line at the grocery store. This ain’t that.