Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Hiring the right resources

I thought I’d write a bit about hiring the right people. I read Mike’s blog entry about hiring, and I wanted to add a few comments on that subject.

Our business is defined by knowing and hiring the right resources always. The best source for quality people is always from the personal network - as most of our best resources come from those we know. Quality people tend to know other quality people, and there’s still no substitute for personal recommendation.

However, when you can’t rely on the network connections for people, I thought I’d pass along some screening tips I learned as a recruiter during my stint in Big 4 consulting.

We had a pre-screen interview (30 minutes or less) and it had 4 questions on it. I think those 4 questions are able to identify the best quality candidates, and here’s why:

Question 1: What does the company do? This question demonstrates that the candidate has at least done some research about your company, and may even demonstrate some surprising understandings based on what they might find out about you. You can judge interest and understanding from this question.

Question 2: What extracurricular leadership activities do you take part in? Everyone has a “day job”. That may be as a student (if you’re doing new hires), or a current position (if you’re hiring an experienced candidate). If someone is willing to devote their time & talent outside of work to something else (in a leadership role), then that person may have leadership qualities you can tap into. If the person is neighborhood garage sale coordinator, soccer coach, youth club leader, or any other leadership activity, this demonstrates two things that are valuable: Leadership, and initiative - both vital qualities in a successful candidate.

Question 3: How many hours do you work in a typical week? For new hires, we determined that a full time student that also held a 20 hour/week job (regardless of the nature of that job), showed the ability to schedule, time manage, and demonstrate responsibility. This question is obviously geared for student recruiting - but the same can be applied to experienced hires as well, just with different frame of reference. Ask those questions that demonstrate the ability to multitask, or hold a disciplined work schedule (ask anyone with kids this question, and you’ll know what I mean).

Question 4: Tell me about a time when you were NOT able to perform a task you were instructed to do. What did you do? This question is one designed to reveal their problem solving ability. You will learn a lot about the person based on the situation they explain to you (can they even explain themselves well?). The solutions to overcoming their difficulty will tell you something about their ability to solve problems for you. Answers like “I got help” or “I researched the problem until I found the answer” are generally good, while “I quit”, “I yelled at the customer because they were stupid”, “I told the boss to deal with it”, (all answers I’ve received in interviews) may not indicate the best person for the position.

These 4 questions typically take about 20 minutes, and can tell you the factors about an employee that have the best indicators of success: Interest & Understanding, Leadership, Initiative, Time Balancing, Scheduling, Responsibility, and Problem Solving ability. You’ll also likely be able to assess if the person would be a good fit with the team that you’ve already got in place, because those same skills you’re interviewing the candidate for, will also be valuable skills for fitting in with your current team.

I’ve seen fancier interview techniques, but these 4 questions seem to be an accurate indicator of success in my field, and I think you’ll see that most of these traits are the ones that are the best indicators of success in any field.

Related Topics: ProCore Resources    No Comments    

The Tyranny of the Urgent

Wow! I just got a reminder today about what should be important about running a small business. Making our clients happy!

Instead - I got a lesson in marketplace competition (where I was on the losing end).

Here’s the situation: I had a client that had an open job posting for a project manager. I had the PERFECT candidate. I forwarded the resume in via the regular channels, and then I tried to set up a meeting with my client to discuss the opportunity, my perfect candidate, and the value proposition my client would receive from having a resource with skills from my company (vs. anyone else’s company).

Then - my client postponed due to a conflicting meeting. Then I couldn’t meet, we traded a few emails trying to arrange schedules, but I never got to give any of those valuable marketing messages to my client.

We finally managed to set up a meeting for next week, and I was all ready to give my wonderful marketing messages.

Then - I got an email from the client’s Human Resources director (who manages the hiring). They sent out a generic email stating that the company had just filled the position - and thanked us for sending in resumes. I got shut out.

So - I think it’s a great lesson in letting the day-to-day urgent tasks get in the way of the important tasks - like building relationships, and performing long term planning.

Make sure you’re not caught up in the day to day so much that you don’t do the things you need to grow.

Related Topics: ProCore Resources    No Comments    

What’s your plan?

Probably the most critical skill that a business owner (and especially a consultant) needs is the ability to plan. Surprisingly, this isn’t a skill that many people can do well. Everyone says they can plan- but in reality, the plan is a collection of random items without structure and is effectively a “to do” list.

Why plan? Because you can set dates, milestones and budgets (all these things should be available from your plan). Most importantly - you can set expectations.

So what makes up a good plan?

The plan needs structure, and it needs to tell a story. I typically break a plan into 3 sections - Plan, Prepare, Execute.

Plan is just that - list out the tasks that you need to complete the plan. This includes research, structure, and other activities necessary to develop your plan.

Prepare is the section devoted to gathering the materials you need to actually perform the plan. This includes gathering materials, preparing documentation templates, and identifying remaining details about execution of your plan.

Finally Execute - these are the steps that actually make something happen.

What are the guidelines to creating a plan?

First - EVERY step in the plan has a deliverable. There should be a document, or some other tangible result of each step on your plan. “Think about marketing” isn’t a plan step - there’s no deliverable. “Develop Marketing Questionnaire” is a plan step - the deliverable is “Draft Questionnaire”.

Second - In order to define the plan - you have to be able to count everything. “Perform Market Research” is open ended - and you can’t count the deliverables. “Perform 3 target market studies”, with deliverables as “under 18, 18-35, 35 and up” are quantifiable and definative.

Third - assign effort, duration, due date and dollars. Each deliverable should have a number of hours associated with it, and an expected delivery date (example - performing market research may take only 8 hours of time, but the surveys will be conducted over a 2 week period. Both facts should be included in your plan. That way you can budget the time, and also have an expecation of when things should be complete. You should also assign cost to each line item (even if it’s your own time - put your expected hourly rate). That way you can really see that “time is moneY”.

Fourth - Manage. You’ve created the plan. However, no good plan is ever executed the way you drew it up. Some things will take longer than expected (an estimating problem). Some things won’t be available when you expect them…causing delay (a resource allocation problem). Some things you won’t know how to do - and you’ll need help (a skills problem). That’s where your skills as a manager come to play - you need to react to these things, juggle time, resources, and external factors to make sure that your end goal is achieved.

Fifth - Mitigate. Think about all the things that can go wrong in your plan. Make contingency plans for these items, or at least acknowledge the risks associated with them. You’ll be surprised how much thinking about “bad stuff” will cause you to re-think your plan and tackle something differently - in order to reduce the risk profile of your plan.

Good luck!

Related Topics: ProCore Resources    No Comments    

Meet ProCore Resources

Who are we? ProCore Resource Group is a professional services consulting and staffing resource provider founded by four former Big 4 consulting executives. We started our company in July of 2004, and two of the four founding members are continuing our operations today by providing excellent resources to our clients at a price point that cannot be matched by larger consulting houses. We provide both consulting services as well as staff augmentation; however, our goal is to provide value-added consulting services to ALL of our clients, regardless of why or how they originally wanted to do business with us.

I hope that through the story lines provided in this blog – I’ll be able to outline our initial startup days (also known as 4 guys and a laptop), talk about some of the challenges as two of our founding partners left the company, and also provide some insights and thoughts about being a small consulting shop in a Big 4 world. I’ll try to provide some views about the consulting industry as a whole, and also provide some tips & help for those that wish to be consultants (or start a consulting business). Finally, our company was founded to bring a unique value proposition to our clients – one that helps our clients navigate strategic change. We found that companies that are trying to execute on change, are not capable of doing so. This is largely because they have Operations people performing their roles. The job of Operations people is to keep things running – not to change the way things operate. To implement change – it requires a completely different set of skills & resources. Our passion lies in helping people navigate strategic change – and we believe we’ve got the necessary tools and resources to provide a better service to our clients in this area than any Big 4 consulting firm can provide. I hope to explain some of our “secret sauce” for navigating strategic change….and perhaps provide some helpful insights that will be useful for others.
If at any time, a blog entry causes some comment or thought that you’d like to share – please email me at bhattaway@procoreresources.com .

Related Topics: ProCore Resources    No Comments