8th
Building an Agency; Part 2 - How To, Cont’d
This is a quick note, as I’m jamming on a number of stuff this evening.
I previously mentioned personal dynamics, and mixing ingredients. This is most true for the first few people you bring in. The reason? They’ll all make each other better, but only if they get along and believe in each other. The good will be pushed to be great, the great, to stellar.
A recruiter once took me to lunch as our first point of contact, and amazingly enough no one had really done it before. I thought it was a great idea — see how a person is in a more informal situation. Not sweating inside someone’s stuffy office. So how do you measure the mixability?
4. Take them all to lunch. Take the top contenders of your various capabilities to lunch together. See how they interact. Candidates will be super pleased to be getting a free lunch, and generally people enjoy interacting with new people. Interacting is the key word there, as if you hire them, that’s what they’ll be doing. With other peers, with clients, and so on. You need to see what’s up with them personally as well as professionally. I can look at a number of people I would’ve passed on if given this test. So eat the cost and save money later by hiring people that work together. Really work.
More tomorrow!
