Mary Ellen Slayter at SmartBrief has an interesting article on how she successfully hired 10,000 people in her recruiting career and did a pretty good job of choosing the right candidates. Although, she did this at a large, public companies, we think it applies equally well to small businesses. We would argue that it is even more important to hire the right people in small businesses because it doesn’t take long for your businesses to go down when one or two employees fail to do a good job.
For any small business that is hiring employees for customer facing roles the need to hire people who are enthusiastic and outgoing is critical. Mary Ellen describes a simple test – “handshake” test – she used to do when hiring employees. She would walk up to the job candidate unexpectedly, smile and introduce herself to him/her. If they reacted with enthusiastic smile and greeted with cheer, it was safe to assume that they would behave the same way with customers.
In small businesses your customer facing employees come across this type of situation almost every day when customers are complaining or when they have to handle unexpected surge in business in a short time. If the employees do not handle this situation with calm while keeping a smile on their face, they may end up doing a lot of harm to your business.
The article also made a point of training them properly after the right candidates were hired using the above mentioned technique. The training becomes much easier when you have hired the employees with right attitude.
We provided additional suggestions on hiring the right candidates in the previous post here. We also showed how to on board them effectively after you have hired them. Make sure you include this “handshake” test in your interview process to find candidates with the right attitude.
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Very informative post! I am totally agreed with the fact that employers should hire a employee with right attitude and not only for skills. Skills can be developed at any point of time,if a person is having the right attitude.
executive search – Thank you for your feedback.
Great article and I totally agree! When I am working with executives who speak of employees with bad attitudes, my first question is ” Do bad attitudes ever change?” I see so much wasted energy by leaders trying to fix what can’t be fixed, attitude. And the problem actually starts before they are ever hired. Employers often don’t take the time to build a behavioral interviewing process which they practice on a consistent basis. And assessment tools such as Business DNA can help predict behavior so that you don’t hire bad attitudes!
Beth – Thanks for your insights. Employers do need to pay more attention to attitude and behavioral test during the interview process. You can teach skills to someone who doesn’t have it, hard to change attitude. It’s ingrained in person’s behavior.