The OrganizedWisdom Process for Hiring Exceptional Talent Everytime: 20 How-To Tips To Building Your A-Team

This summer has been an exciting time of growth and extremely busy for the OrganizedWisdom team.  We're growing by every metric we track and as a result we've been adding new talent to our team almost every week. 

In fact, we've been so busy we haven't had time to blog much and have been tweeting a lot instead (@organizedwisdom). But I was asked a few days ago by some fellow entrepreneurs to share some insights about how we manage our hiring process at OrganizedWisdom and our secrets for hiring exceptional talent every time, so I decided to significantly update a previous post I wrote a year ago called 14 Tips to Help You Hire The A-Team based on all of the learning from the past year.

The OrganizedWisdom Process for Hiring Exceptional Talent Everytime:

The most important factor in the success of your business (especially during your initial stages of growth) is the people you hire and how well you build your talent team.

Building companies is not easy.  Each day presents new issues to be resolved.  Plans change quickly and the stages of growth often fluctuate rapidly.  Some people don't like the pace, while others thrive in a start-up environment.

The great news is that being an entrepreneur is also one of the most rewarding and fulfilling ways to spend one's time.  Helping transform a vision from idea to a successful venture that solves new problems is incredibly fun and energizing.

We have a very special philosophy at OrganizedWisdom which guides the way we are building our company.  We are building a results-based organization (ROWE) and we are building what we call The Zero $ Office based on our philosophy of Going Green Virtually (read about it here and here).  This is a plan we are sharing with the world via this blog in hopes of helping other Health 2.0 companies as well as all entrepreneurs learn from our ideas, mistakes, and most valuable lessons learned.  We hope you will share your own lessons in our comments from time to time...

Building The A-Team   

The best way to build a successful company in our opinion is to Build The A-Team.  Simply put, every member of the team, must be an A-Player and strive to be the best at what they do.  Equally as important to hiring A-Players, the team must operate and flow together in a way that allows each team member to focus on their unique ability and in a way that makes the others on the team even more effective.

The A-Player

There's good team members and there's exceptional team members.  We do whatever we can as an organization to attract the very best talent to our team.  It doesn't matter where they are located, what school they went to, how many years experience one has, what schedule they like to work and so on.  All that matters is that each team member we bring on strives each day to be the very best at what they do, and have the passion and drive to be an A-Player.

Lessons from 80s TV

Growing up, I had a few favorite TV shows that looking back taught me a great deal of entrepreneurial wisdom.  In particular, two shows, teach similar principles we believe in very much in at OrganizedWisdom.

One influential show was the action-adventure series called MacGyver which features perhaps the most resourceful character ever written, MacGyver himself.  As an entrepreneur, much of each day involves problem solving, finding creative solutions with limited resources, and finding new approaches to complex challenges. And this is what MacGyver excels at.  No matter what the situation, he made it work and made it happen.  He was all about doing more with less; he was all about results.

We try to only hire MacGyver's at OrganizedWisdom.  People who use ingenuity in their problem solving. People who look for solutions rather than create more problems.  People who do more with less.  People who are dedicated and loyal. People who are good-natured and positive and who you want on your team when the going gets tough.  And most of all people who believe in your mission and want to help people with their work and contributions each day.

Another great show that embodies one of our core principles is the action adventure series The A-Team, a show that features an entire team of A-Players who all must work together using their unique ability to accomplish seemingly impossible missions. It's one thing to have a bunch of great MacGyver's on your team.  It's magic when they all work together effectively, efficiently, and in a way that enhances one-anothers' experience, expertise, ideas and unique abilities.

Our approach is to build our A-Team one person at a time and reasonably slowly.  Here are some practical tips we use to help find A-Players and make sure they are right for our A-Team.

14 20 How To Tips to Help You Build Your A-Team

1) The Founders should head HR - If you want to build a business that lasts and can withstand rapid growth and turbulent times, then the Founders of the company should be in charge of every hire for at least the first 100 people on your team.  This is the best way to build a foundation that can carry on the your integrity, energy and soul and ensure you can scale your personal vision for success.

2) Hire less people.  Smaller teams are usually more effective and can often produce better results.  Having less resources forces the team to innovate, find efficient solutions, not bloat your product or service and focus only on the most important priorities. Consider being understaffed during each successive phase of growth.  You'll find the team will get more done and your organization will have more capital to spend on A-Players down the line.

3) Write detailed job descriptions.  Write a detailed job description clearly outlining the role and define success.  Be clear with the key requirements and specific responsibility.  Think about what that role will be responsible for each day, week, month, etc. and the results they will need to deliver. (See #15 re: defining clear metrics).

4) Set up qualification filter before reviewing resumes.  Each job description should make the candidate do some work before responding to you.  We bake 5 to 7 questions into each job description and ask them to complete the questions along with their resume.  Those who don't bother to answer the questions get tossed immediately. 

5) Don't outsource your hiring. (See #1, I re-iterated because of it's importance) Many companies outsource their hiring to recruiters.  Building your team should be the top priority of the senior management and preferably the founders who hopefully best represent the spirit of the organization. We've been fortunate to work with some amazing recruiters in the past and many of our friends are the best in the business.  But many companies simply outsource the HR functions and don't pay full attention to the value of leading the hiring process with each new hire. At the end, you will save time and money by taking charge of this responsibility.

6) Hire from anywhere.  One of the greatest benefits of Going Green Virtually is we are able to expand our talent pool to anywhere.  We are a borderless company and as a result, we have access to the best talent no matter where they live or want to work.

7) Tap your personal network. No matter where you are looking to hire, the best place to start is usually your personal network v Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, and good old fashion word-of-mouth and conversations with friends and colleagues.  Most people we hire are people we know, have worked with in the past, or were referred to us by a friend or friend of a friend.

8) Work with people and companies you've worked with before.   My partner Steve and I have worked together since 1997 and several people on our team we have worked with before.  Many of our investors have worked with us before or we have known for years.  When you work with people you know and have worked with for years, you have a head start.  You have earned trust, natural flow, and the obvious advantage of knowing how best to leverage each others unique abilities.

9) Let your team do the recruiting.  Any time we are looking to add a new member to the team, we always ask the folks in our company first who they know and to help with the recruiting. We also ask our investors, colleagues and our friends before any other outlets. Great talent attracts great talent, and people who know your business intimately are best equipped to guide you to people who will be right for your team.  Best of all, people on your team know who they want to work with.

10) Post open positions on targeted blogs.  If you are searching for the very best, then don't post your job listing on a generic job board or Craigs List.  Find the very best blogs that people you want to hire would read, and post there.  We believe strongly in many of the principles of 37Signals, so we often use their job board to find the best talent.  

11) Identify Unique Ability. We take special care to identify each new team member's Unique Ability by giving them a Kolbe Test.  These tools are not only fun and interesting, but incredibly useful in helping you determine what people love to do naturally.  We try to then establish goals, metrics, and the team structure based on what people excel at. We also can find patterns within our organization that help us structure the team most effectively.

12) Let the team members participate in the interviewing. Even though the founders/leadership should be responsible for each new hire (especially during the early phases of growth), it is essential that you have the other people on the team interview a prospective new hire. This has several benefits. Your team will be able to identify the best talent based on the day to day needs, you will establish buy-in from your team very early making for a more harmonious team, and your potential A-Player hire will get to know the people they will be working with each day.

13) Hire one team member at a time. Adding new team members to a small and growing company should be managed with great care. Each new team member is significant and will impact the flow, goals, metrics, and working dynamic that has already been established.  We find it most effective to hire and absorb each A-Player slowly and one member at a time.  This will also help you not grow too quickly.

14) Let A-Players interview you. It's one thing to interview a potential hire. It's much better to also let them interview you.  We like our A-Players to grill us about our vision, our goals, our metrics.  We want to make sure they've read our blog, registered for our site, and have the opportunity to ask us difficult questions.  If they can't interview us, and we don't provide sufficient opportunity for them to do so, then we've missed an essential part of the A-Team equation: their insight into us and our plans.

15) Establish metrics-based goals that are clear from the beginning. The most important thing you can do with each new team member, and for your A-Team, is to establish, update, and communicate specific and clear metrics-based goals.  An A-Player needs to know the objective to be great.  And an A-Team needs to know what metrics equal success in order to effectively work together.

16) Start with a small test project.  Checking ones resume and references are great.  So are in-depth interviews.  But we have developed a system to give potential hires a small project before we start working together. The idea is to get an A-Player involved with your organization before you decide to tie the knot.  We are less concerned with what someone has done, and most interested in what a potential new team member can/will do.  We want to see what it's like to start working together.  We want to learn how the team absorbs the new talent.  And we want to new team member to be 100% sure they want to join our team before we both make the commitment to work together for the long haul.

17) Model your best team members.  For each new hire, try to think about what type of talent you need.  Are you trying to fill a gap, compliment a team or model a current team member's skillset?  Use the Kolbe to help you find matching Kolbe scores or missing types within your team.

18) Inspire A-Players by communicating the spirit of your organization.  One of the reasons we blog, and post details about how we are building OrganizedWisdom, is to inspire our team and attract other great talent.  By sharing our philosophy we can find others who share our vision and who want to help make it a success.

19) Make it their company. The best way to build an A-Team is to make sure the company/product/service is the Team's company. The most natural way to build a passionate and dedicated team is to do what you can to make it theirs too.

20) Always be hiring.  We often start hiring for a position a year in advance of knowing we will need to fill it so we can get the best possible person for each position on the team.  And we keep collecting resumes all year long and star the very best for future reference. 

I'm sure I'm missing other great tips, so I'll keep updating this list.  Feel free to share your ideas too