Finding the wheat

A business is only as good as its people so it is interesting to see how firms aim to ensure that they get the best staff. Each organisation has its own strategy, some more conventional than others.

I read about one employer who never looked at CVs and just picked a few candidates at random on the grounds that he would rather his staff were lucky than good interviewees. I’m not sure I agree with the analysis but his actions were primarily motivated by the difficulty in evaluating potential employees via interviews.

I have always found it very difficult to accurately assess someone in an hour-long interview. Any reasonably intelligent person who has prepared for should be able to present themselves as a useful addition to the firm. The key is being able to see beneath the pretence and find the true person.

Psychologists say that such decisions are made within the first five minutes of an interview. An interviewer will generally make an instant decision as to whether they like someone based on their appearance and their personality. This knee-jerk reaction must be overcome and replaced with a more rational assessment.

When I started work, I only needed to convince an employer that I was honest and would work hard. Nowadays, employers are looking for more. Additional requirements include business development, PR in the form of articles or blogs, public speaking, and interpersonal and team-building skills. All these attributes need a strong and likeable personality that comes over well verbally or in writing. Successful entrepreneurs look for three main attributes in potential employees: personality, experience and expertise.

So how do you employ the right people? I tend to end up with a shortlist of three people, any of whom I would be happy to employ. That way I am picking from a position of strength. Getting to that point is more complicated, though. I try to use the SWAN formula – named after executive recruiter John Swan – which stands for smart, work hard, ambitious and nice.

Being ambitious is important because those people will go that bit further than their job description requires and most likely offer innovation. The most underrated quality is the need for the person to be pleasant company and a team player.

Having the same candidate interviewed by several different people can help the process as well to prevent people recruiting in their own image. Interviews are, of course, a two-way street. The interviewer can also lose a potential employee as well. One protracted interview process that I endured involved several interviews and case studies during which both the professional staff interviewing me resigned. The primary interviewer also looked to be one of the most stressed people I had seen in a long time. I decided that perhaps my immediate career lay elsewhere.

I suspect there is little truth in the urban myths about investment banks putting candidates through 20 interviews before rejecting them. But the banks are no doubt happy for the rumours to circulate as it demonstrates the high standards that they require and the importance of getting your staff right.

Any firm that does not get the best from its employees is destined to under achieve and ultimately fail. The crucial step in this process is, of course, to recruit the right people from the start.

Geraint Jones is a private client partner at Reeves

He writes the regular in-practice article on doing business for Private Client Adviser

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