What’s the Impact of Only Hiring the Best Employees?

How important is it to find and hire the best employees? Most Important.

Bradford Smart, author of Topgrading (the best book I’ve ever read on hiring), says to never hire an employee unless you are truly happy with how they interviewed and every single reference is glowing. Unless you’re 100% confident in your choice, he says that you should stay the course and keep searching. I have to say that I agree.

Recently I was hiring for an outside company sales position, a key position within our store. In our first round, we interviewed our top six candidates from the stack of resumes we had collected over two weeks, to no avail. After going through the interviews, both myself and my Managing Partner agreed that even though we had a couple of good candidates, the person we were looking for was not in that group, so we started over and kept looking. We simply refuse to settle for second best. I’d rather start over and continue the search, than settle for second best.

This is how I’ve managed to assemble such great teams in all of our operations. We never settle. I want only A-Players to be working on our teams. If someone doesn’t cut it as an A-Player or we don’t see the potential, then we’ll keep looking until we find that right person.

This strategy hasn’t always been easy, but it certainly has been extremely successful for us over the years.

Thinking through the impacts of hiring the best employees, not just average players has brought my business some of the following

• Amazing ideas on how to be more efficient – everywhere from the customer checkout to handling inventory
• Customer experiences that can’t be duplicated – the best employees know how to create unique experiences and go the extra mile.
• Innovation and a commitment to improvement from every level – the best employees even push me to make my business better, and often notice the small things that can be changed and improve Green Village

So my challenge to you is to remain dedicated to building a team of A-Players in your company, even if it sometimes means short-term pain for long-term gain.

Andy

Check out “Why Startups Should ALWAYS Compromise When Hiring” for a different perspective and Best Hiring Secrets – Staff Your Firm With Highly Productive Employees for some great tips.