My CEO Life

Now this is an interesting question that got me thinking about how to interview …

I am taking course “Employment Practices” as part of my curriculum requirements for Human Resource Management at a local community college.  We are studying about interviews at the present time.  We have two resumes with almost the same qualifications and requirements.  We have to decide what five criteria are most important and what questions to ask for the position of Chief Executive Officer of a Hospital.  Do you have any recommendations or questions that really could distinguish the better candidate.

Apart from doing someone else’s homework, the real question here is how do you sort through the b.s. to really understand how someone thinks and whether they would be a good candidate for a role.

Well the approach i take is to make them work for their interview not just ask them questions.  Questions often tell you nothing.  People often lie and they are never going to tell you the  information you REALLY want to know about them.

So what i do is set them a problem.   For sales people i say “sell yourself to me” … if they don’t ask me 100 questions before talking about themselves, then they are not a good sales person.  The same can be done for a CEO.  Set them a real business problem.  Ask them to think strategically about a real life issue a hospital may face and then ask them to solve the problem.  How do they approach it?  Do they think strategically, shoot from the hip, etc … it is not what they say, but how they approach it.

As they are going, probe various areas - people / leadership etc … ask them how they would do something and see what they say.  There are no right answers … just  how they approach it.

Finally the other killer question is the one that is “so what questions do you have for me?” … this shows how much they really know and how hard they have thought about it.  This uncovers passion / leadership and general smarts. No questions - no job.  Crap questions - no job.  Dumb questions - no job.  Smart, insightful questions - a great start.

So - this is not a simple approach but one that delivers the results.

I am not sure about many of you out there but finding great employees is extremely hard.  I can run ads in papers and online and get flooded with results but how do you wade through the emails from around the world, how do you know that you have found the right person and how do you avoid those recruiter fees?

Well a tool we use alot in the business in internal referral.  We have a $1500 reward for any employee who recommends someone else to join and that person survives their probation period.  We are looking modifying this so that it is scalable - $1000 for first person, $1500 for second, $2500 for third etc …

I reckon we have employed 30% of our staff using this method and it works.  The best thing is that one of the key success measures in employing a person is cultural fit.  Having those inside help employ ensures cultural fit (well most of the time!)

As the Chief Executive Officer, I have personally introduced some key people to the business - and often they are from other countries.  My CFO i have known for 10 years and was recruited from Germany, my CIO i have know for 6 years and was recruited from San Francisco, and our internal process improvement manager is also from Germany and someone i have known for ages.  And the list goes on.  It is not about jobs for friends, as i have some of my Senior management or the Board interview them too.

What is interesting is that our CFO has introduced another 3 people to the business - 2 from Germany.  This approach can also broaden your recruitment market from your local market to the world.

I am working on the theory that great people know great people and so on.

As many of you know, i run an internet company. As such, we spend a chunk of time looking at where the internet is going and what future may hold for us.

The following link was sent to me and i found it a interesting and scary view of what may occur in the future.

http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=5927

It all comes down to linking disparate pieces of information together to form a holistic view of the customer. Now in most cases this is something that should be done to give the customer better service, we need to be sure that we don’t go overboard and scare the customer away.

We are all private people and have the right to our privacy.

It will be interesting how companies think about the information they are collecting on people and how they utilise this information to improve customer service.