Advertise For The Right People.

Train The Right Employees.

Do You Advertise For The Right People?

Belief Drives Behavior

What human beings do is determined by who those human beings are.  Who they are is determined by the things they believe.

Let that sink in for a minute.

Now consider the way that we hire and train people in most companies.

1. We advertise an opening
2. We list responsibilities associated with that opening
3. We list requirements of Education, Expertise, and Experience
4. We Hire
5. We train people to do things we believe in
6. We hold them accountable for acting according to our beliefs
7. We Reward or Rebuke them based upon how they perform

Now let’s revisit the opening premise of this article: Belief Drives Behavior

This is why New Year’s Resolutions fail, why diets rarely work, and why companies constantly struggle with mismatched employees.  We focus on a problem such as our disorganization, our weight, or our job opening.  Then we pursue Education, Expertise, and Experience that we believe will fix the problem while allowing the source of these elements to take a backseat to price and expediency.  Does it matter whether the author of that weight-loss book believes the same things we do about health and life and family?  In the same fashion, does it matter whether that new employee with all the right credentials believes the same things we do about customers and service and culture?

You Bet It Does!

The fact that someone looks in good in an outfit doesn’t mean that he or she is a proper mate for life.  By the same token, just because someone has a sexy resume, doesn’t mean that they are a good mate for our business.  Here are some myths that we buy into:

Skills Are The Most Important Thing

There’s no doubt that skills are important.  You can’t perform a top quality service or produce a top quality product without skills.  They’re just not the most important thing.  A customer who received a top quality product or service may recommend you in the right setting where people are talking about it and he or she happens to remember.  However, a customer who received a top quality product or service from someone he or she genuinely liked and had a great time getting it, will look for opportunities to recommend you in any setting.

Education Is The Most Important Thing

Instant internet downloadable culture has trained us to believe that once we know how to do something, we are capable of doing that something at a high level – especially of we got an A in the process.  There’s a big difference between knowing how to hit a home run and being able to hit home runs consistently.  That difference is Experience.

Experience Is The Most Important Thing

Experience is Education that has been fortified with practice.  The trouble with Experience is that it can be good or bad depending on the quality of the practice.  I’ve hit six home runs in my lifetime, so if someone were to ask if I have experience hitting home runs, I can honestly say, “Yes.”  The fact that I was in junior high at the time and stopped playing baseball in favor of playing music in the 9th grade significantly colors that response.  If someone were to ask the same question of Hank Aaron, that same, “Yes,” means something entirely different.

Expertise Is The Most Important Thing

Expertise is Experience that can produce verified results.  While it’s a safer bet for “Most Important Thing” status, Expertise isn’t everything.  If I am an expert at producing Thingamabobs and I can prove it by sharing verifiable statistics showing that I have produced thousands of Thingamabobs in my career, all you know is just that.  I have produced Thingamabobs.  You don’t know how I did it.  You don’t know what it was like to work with me while I was doing it.  And, most importantly, you don’t know if I can or will do it the way you want me to.

People Are Hard To Train and Training Is Expensive

This myth is usually a poor excuse for lazy management.  People aren’t hard to train, training is hard to do.  Training requires a complete investment of all 3 resources: Time, Talent, and Treasure.  Then once you’ve created it, training requires the number one, single, most difficult thing in the whole universe: Consistency.  The truth is that we con ourselves with this myth, because we don’t want to put in the effort it takes to pull it off.

Personal Beliefs Are Private Things And It’s Unprofessional To Talk About Them

The ironic thing about our efforts to keep everything “professional”  by not discussing beliefs in our ads and interviews, is that beliefs are what we want to know most about each other.  From the moment we meet someone that we work with or live near, we want to know what he or she believes.  After all, how can we build  relationships with people if we don’t know how to connect with them or, at the very least, not offend them?  Conveniently though, not discussing the personal beliefs of others often means that we don’t have to be accountable for our own.

People Can Enjoy Doing Things They Don’t Believe In For Enough Money

This is perhaps the greatest fallacy of all when it comes to hiring.  It is simply foolish to believe that people can or will do things they don’t believe in for any length of time if you pay them enough.  Incentives only work if they lead us to places of greater satisfaction and substance.  Otherwise, they’re just tempting poisons.

So what do we do?  This.

Advertise For The Right People And Train Them To Be The Right Employees.

Identify your core beliefs.  Advertise for people who believe them same things you do.  Provide the Education and Experience that will bring them Expertise.  Then hold on to them for all your worth, because that’s what will make your company successful.