How to Evaluate and Choose The Best Employees Video

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How to Evaluate and Choose The Best Employees

Susan: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us here on SBTV.com for our featured adviser series with Sam Carpenter. He was from the beautiful area of Bend, Oregon. He is a successful entrepreneur and he is the author of Work the System this simple mechanics to working less and making more and of course the title just absolutely caught me. So we’re really thrilled that you are part of our featured adviser to team Sam. Sam: Thank you Susan. Susan: And we have certainly covered a lot in our segments with you here. Some really truly great advice and we talk about your systems and creating procedures and documentation and really looking at every element of the business and how you can improve it to be more efficient. So in order to do all of that Sam you’ve got to have really talented people working with you. So the question is as a business owner where do you find those people and how do you know you’re getting the right one? So how do you evaluate and hire that right person? Sam: They’re everywhere. Great people are everywhere. The problem we run into with businesses is probably we run into speaking—from my own experiences is that we expect our employees to be mind readers, our fortune tellers too. And so when we bring somebody in we’re suddenly disappointed over a period of time despite their wonderful personality and their educational background and their linguistic capabilities that they can’t read our minds. And so there’s ultimately disappointment. So what we do, we go out and we find anyone of these good people. We lore them in and we say, “We’re going to give you a system that we can see you—in fact to learn this job you’re going to go over here in this office for three days and learn your system it’s all documented. To learn your job and of course any job takes time to learn the subtleties of that business, right? Susan: Then right. Sam: But when they come into my business these good people, drug free people. People who can type highly intelligent people coming and we give them something they can work with them. We never ask them to be mind readers. And what’s this that always goes back to bring the true documentation. “So here’s your job description, here’s what we do. Here’s our direction. Here are the principles of operation. Here are our working procedures. Here is what you have to work with. This is it.”, and if we don’t abide by this new person. I want new person to come to me and say, “This isn’t right.” And we’ll probably fix it. Susan: Sure. Sam: So they’re everywhere out there. And the idea that finding good people is difficult. Its difficult thing to do is just not true. They’re out there. Susan: You know I was speaking in an event recently and a lady stood in the audience and she said, “I cannot find anyone to be my assistant. I have gone through all of these people.” and I asked her the question, “Have you ever sat down and done a job description? “Well, no.” and you know and I said, “What do you expect to, do you like read your mind.” I mean that could that could be part of the problem, obviously. But Sam in the book you actually have a 10 step process for hiring. Sam: Right, so we have 10 parameters and we go through every one of them, and we can go through them quickly here if you’d like. Susan: Why don’t you just hit some of the key ones and then we’ll shared with the audience that they need to go get the book. How that right? Sam: They need to buy the book. Susan: Yeah, a little shameless promotion here as Sam but hit some of the key points of course. Sam: Well, we do is an I.Q. test. Susan: Really? Sam: We call our evaluation our aptitude evaluation test and there needs to be a certain amount of reasoning ability and that’s what an I.Q test is. What is your reasoning ability? And remember half of the population has less than average and half of the population has more than average reasoning ability to take somebody and put them in a difficult management position. They don’t have the aptitude, the reasoning power to handle that is unfair to that person. It’s unfair to the employer and so both of the eyebrows raise when I say that we do this. What we need to know if somebody has the reasoning ability to do the job is that fair? Well, is it fair to judge somebody by how they look? Is it fair to judge somebody by their education? Or we can go in and the fairness thing is as far as you work. Susan: Our years of experienced or yeah? Sam: You have some experienced? We never share the results. We never, never share the results with the employee or the potential employee. The other thing we do is drug testing. We absolutely do drug testing. In my company many years ago we were just having crazy problems all the time and they, “Why did you do this? I don’t understand?” “Well, I don’t know.” You know Susan, we implemented the drug testing and it’s like the cycling teams from the United States that tour for us this summer. Susan: Right. Sam: Strict drug testing and you know as soon as we started doing in, some people laughed. We had these crazy problems anymore, and so that’s another criteria. You have to get through the what we call the aptitude test. You have to pass the drug testing. Does the applicant look you in the eye when they’re talking to you? Is the applicant not listening to what you’re saying, and really wants to expound without, you know what I mean. Susan: I see, right. Sam: So you’re interviewing somebody and he just wants you to finish so they can explain how wonderful they are. Susan: So they can tell you what they think, right? Sam: Right. And so how are they dressed? That’s important. Did they show up on time? And all of these sound elementary, but we have these 10 parameters and if they don’t pass every single one of these parameters we don’t hire them because that one problem will nullify all the positive ones if you think about it. And the other thing we do is this “gut” feeling about hiring somebody. We never used a “gut” decision to hire somebody. We use “gut” decisions to disqualify people only. Susan: I see. Sam: You see what I mean? This person’s meeting all the parameters, but I’m just getting a bad feeling about the way they look at me here. Susan: Right. Sam: There is something— Susan: Or maybe their personality is abrupt or? Sam: Right or something and so I just—you know what it is it’s maybe it’s going to be a personality conflict maybe, and that’s enough. Susan: Right. Sam: To not put that person in the position how to deal with you. And you have to deal with them. We use mechanical decision making to hire people not “guts” feelings. Susan: Well, I think it’s important and that’s part of the “gut” feeling that the individual will fit into your company culture, so they’re part of the team. They’re not just going to disrupt that that flow in sense of community. Sam: Right. Susan: Right. Sam: Exactly. Susan: Now, you also talked about some of the questions that you ask employees or applicants. Can you share because I personally Sam, I always struggle with that. It’s like well tell me a little bit about yourself. What are some of the key things you would ask? Sam: Here’s a great question for somebody who just coming to work at Centratel, the telephone answering service is. What can you tell me about my company? What do you know about Centratel. Did they take the time to look at the website? Did they take the time to investigate? And why do you want to work here? What brought you to this town you say you’re a newcomer to this town? Why are you here? Where you hope to be with Centratel in five years? Are you here just for a paycheck? We ask questions that direct and that puts people on the edge to the point where they have to be honest. So many people go into an interview and this is another thing we understand, so many people go into an interview as if it’s a game. And I’ve had this happen over and over again where the challenge from the other side is to be hired. “I’m going to convince this employer to hire me.” And then once they’re hired they’re not so interested with the job anymore. Susan: Then every body looking for the other one. Sam: Right. They’re ready for the next challenge. So we ask questions that will expose the real reasons they’re there, and do they really need a job? Another thing is we don’t hire part time people at all. We want a full time people that will take the job seriously and the paycheck seriously. And who will be there 40 hours a week, and develop some expertise and whatever their position is going to be with the company. So we get underneath and we ask these questions. It’s in the book. Susan: Sure, okay. Sam: But we get underneath and ask. Susan: It really gets a sense. Sam: What are the systems driving this person to be sitting here today? Were they on time? If they’re not on time they’re probably not going to get the job. We don’t mind if they’re late as long as they call and say they’re going to be late. If they got lost, they have a problem at home, but if they come wandering in 20 minutes late this kind of a waste of time. Susan: They are not much interested in the job. You could assume that anyway. Sam: Well, it could be that or it could be there discombobulated. They have a problem with time and they have I mean there could be any anyone of those problems would be a problem in their position with the company. Susan: Sure it’s an important element. We did a story actually on the situational interviews and the reason we did that is we found and I think you’re actually saying that there’s a lot of people who are just good interviewers or interviewees but they’re really not the right talent for the job. Sam: Exactly. Susan: Right. Sam: Exactly, that’s the hurdle that the employer needs to get by. Susan: Let me ask you though let’s go back to the I.Q. test and the drug testing. You don’t perform those yourself in house. Do you use a service or how do you do that? Sam: We actually do them in house. Susan: Okay. Sam: And the $9.00 for a kit, and we do them randomly. And when I say we do random drug test of all our employees three times a year. We take everybody and everybody gets testing. We don’t picked this personnel or that personnel, but we do them in house and if there’s a question we send them down to the professionals at emergency care and we pay $40 and they do the full screen, blood test. In a few times we had problems the professional supported our conclusions. Susan: Okay. Then that’s important. I mean you really do you have to take that extra to protect yourself. Sam: Exactly, and it is a saliva test. It’s clean and sanitary and there’s no embarrassment about it. Everybody knows. Susan: Sure. Sam: And everybody, our employees are 30 employees we’re glad we do it because as soon as somebody comes in with that kind of a problem they don’t fit in. Susan: Sure. Sam: They just even if we don’t know what the problem was. They just probably not going to fit. There’s going to be problems. Susan: Now Sam I’m actually going to switch gears just a tiny bit. We’ve talked about job description. You talked about the importance of a new hire. We talked about that giving them the documentation, but let me flip this around. Let’s say that you’re the manager or you’re the business owner and I work for you, and I recognized the importance of exactly what Sam Carpenter’s saying. How would I get you to buy into writing this documentation and having the job descriptions put in place? Sam: Thank you for bringing this up Susan and I’m so glad to go over this part a bit. So up until now and this segment the viewer maybe thinking, “Oh great, so this is Sam Carpenter guys going to write of all these instructions and everybody out there is going to just follow them exactly. And it’s not at all the way it happens. At first I did most of the documentation as we developed the work the system method, but now 98% of the documentation is performed by the employees. And why well they make about double what they make anywhere else. And they don’t work over 40 hours a week. It’s a nice place to work. So here’s what happens. Let’s say there’s a procedure with 23 steps to do the deposit okay. So one of my managers who is doing the deposit says, “Well, this changed over here step seven is just stupid. We don’t need to do it anymore.” So they will come to me in the office. It might maybe on the hallway and say, “You know the step seven for this reason is just dump.” And then I might check with somebody else, so the three of us will get together. We talk about it. And then that cash and concrete you will not deviate from the procedure. That procedure is changed instantly. Susan: Sure. Sam: So it’s cash and concrete. Susan: Flexible. Sam: It is like a transformer. Remember the movie? The kid story, and that the characters will—its still and it’s hard a bit but it’s really different. Susan: Right. Sam: So we like to think of our procedures as being cash and concrete, but we’ll be able to change them in a snap of a finger. No bureaucracy involved. We’ll change it for the better, and so employees know that these procedures can be change instantly with their input and there’s another word empowerment. Susan: Sure. Sam: But it makes them understand that they have a say in there. And also everybody knows I don’t do the documentation anymore. It will go through me a lot of times. Susan: Sure. Sam: The important ones to make sure it’s following our strategic objective because it’s up to me as CEO the key things going on a straight line, but they know that when they have input it will be instantly recognize and then all probability. The 90% of the time whose recommendations will happen and somebody actually we’ll meet in the hallway we agreed to change it. They go right to the computer and changing. Susan: And change the right term in there. Sam: And distribute the hard copy that everybody and it’s done. Susan: Well, you know it is so important that people feel invested and feel like they have a voice. Sam: Right. Susan: Regardless of what type of business or industry you’re in. Sam: Of course. Susan: So, absolutely. Well, Sam I tell you. You really know what you’re talking about, and I have learned so much already from this series and I really appreciate you being part of the team here. Sam: Well, I’m flattered and I thank you very much. Susan: Great and let’s mention your website again to because you can downloaded the information there I know, so that is called. Sam: That’s a good download, workthesytem.com. Susan: Right. Sam: And that’s where they get the book until this winter while the book is in book stores. Susan: And we’ll be looking forward to that absolutely. Sam: Thank you. Susan: Thank you and thanks to all of you for watching us here today. Sam Carpenter on our featured advisor series. Be sure to check out other segments and great advice from Sam as well as our other featured advisors on our featured advisor channel. And once again, thanks for watching. We’re SBTV.com where small business is our only business.

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Susan: Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us here on SBTV.com for our featured adviser series with Sam Carpenter. He was from the beautiful area of Bend, Oregon. He is a successful entrepreneur and he is the author of Work the System this simple mechanics to working less and making more and of course the title just absolutely caught me. So we’re really thrilled that you are part of our featured adviser to team Sam.

Sam: Thank you Susan.

Susan: And we have certainly covered a lot in our segments with you here. Some really truly great advice and we talk about your systems and creating procedures and documentation and really looking at every element of the business and how you can improve it to be more efficient.

So in order to do all of that Sam you’ve got to have really talented people working with you. So the question is as a business owner where do you find those people and how do you know you’re getting the right one? So how do you evaluate and hire that right person?

Sam: They’re everywhere. Great people are everywhere. The problem we run into with businesses is probably we run into speaking—from my own experiences is that we expect our employees to be mind readers, our fortune tellers too. And so when we bring somebody in we’re suddenly disappointed over a period of time despite their wonderful personality and their educational background and their linguistic capabilities that they can’t read our minds. And so there’s ultimately disappointment.

So what we do, we go out and we find anyone of these good people. We lore them in and we say, “We’re going to give you a system that we can see you—in fact to learn this job you’re going to go over here in this office for three days and learn your system it’s all documented. To learn your job and of course any job takes time to learn the subtleties of that business, right?

Susan: Then right.

Sam: But when they come into my business these good people, drug free people. People who can type highly intelligent people coming and we give them something they can work with them. We never ask them to be mind readers. And what’s this that always goes back to bring the true documentation. “So here’s your job description, here’s what we do. Here’s our direction. Here are the principles of operation. Here are our working procedures. Here is what you have to work with. This is it.”, and if we don’t abide by this new person. I want new person to come to me and say, “This isn’t right.” And we’ll probably fix it.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: So they’re everywhere out there. And the idea that finding good people is difficult. Its difficult thing to do is just not true. They’re out there.

Susan: You know I was speaking in an event recently and a lady stood in the audience and she said, “I cannot find anyone to be my assistant. I have gone through all of these people.” and I asked her the question, “Have you ever sat down and done a job description? “Well, no.” and you know and I said, “What do you expect to, do you like read your mind.” I mean that could that could be part of the problem, obviously. But Sam in the book you actually have a 10 step process for hiring.

Sam: Right, so we have 10 parameters and we go through every one of them, and we can go through them quickly here if you’d like.

Susan: Why don’t you just hit some of the key ones and then we’ll shared with the audience that they need to go get the book. How that right?

Sam: They need to buy the book.

Susan: Yeah, a little shameless promotion here as Sam but hit some of the key points of course.

Sam: Well, we do is an I.Q. test.

Susan: Really?

Sam: We call our evaluation our aptitude evaluation test and there needs to be a certain amount of reasoning ability and that’s what an I.Q test is. What is your reasoning ability? And remember half of the population has less than average and half of the population has more than average reasoning ability to take somebody and put them in a difficult management position. They don’t have the aptitude, the reasoning power to handle that is unfair to that person. It’s unfair to the employer and so both of the eyebrows raise when I say that we do this. What we need to know if somebody has the reasoning ability to do the job is that fair? Well, is it fair to judge somebody by how they look? Is it fair to judge somebody by their education? Or we can go in and the fairness thing is as far as you work.

Susan: Our years of experienced or yeah?

Sam: You have some experienced? We never share the results. We never, never share the results with the employee or the potential employee. The other thing we do is drug testing. We absolutely do drug testing. In my company many years ago we were just having crazy problems all the time and they, “Why did you do this? I don’t understand?” “Well, I don’t know.”

You know Susan, we implemented the drug testing and it’s like the cycling teams from the United States that tour for us this summer.

Susan: Right.

Sam: Strict drug testing and you know as soon as we started doing in, some people laughed. We had these crazy problems anymore, and so that’s another criteria. You have to get through the what we call the aptitude test. You have to pass the drug testing. Does the applicant look you in the eye when they’re talking to you? Is the applicant not listening to what you’re saying, and really wants to expound without, you know what I mean.

Susan: I see, right.

Sam: So you’re interviewing somebody and he just wants you to finish so they can explain how wonderful they are.

Susan: So they can tell you what they think, right?

Sam: Right. And so how are they dressed? That’s important. Did they show up on time? And all of these sound elementary, but we have these 10 parameters and if they don’t pass every single one of these parameters we don’t hire them because that one problem will nullify all the positive ones if you think about it. And the other thing we do is this “gut” feeling about hiring somebody. We never used a “gut” decision to hire somebody. We use “gut” decisions to disqualify people only.

Susan: I see.

Sam: You see what I mean? This person’s meeting all the parameters, but I’m just getting a bad feeling about the way they look at me here.

Susan: Right.

Sam: There is something—

Susan: Or maybe their personality is abrupt or?

Sam: Right or something and so I just—you know what it is it’s maybe it’s going to be a personality conflict maybe, and that’s enough.

Susan: Right.

Sam: To not put that person in the position how to deal with you. And you have to deal with them. We use mechanical decision making to hire people not “guts” feelings.

Susan: Well, I think it’s important and that’s part of the “gut” feeling that the individual will fit into your company culture, so they’re part of the team. They’re not just going to disrupt that that flow in sense of community.

Sam: Right.

Susan: Right.

Sam: Exactly.

Susan: Now, you also talked about some of the questions that you ask employees or applicants. Can you share because I personally Sam, I always struggle with that. It’s like well tell me a little bit about yourself. What are some of the key things you would ask?

Sam: Here’s a great question for somebody who just coming to work at Centratel, the telephone answering service is. What can you tell me about my company? What do you know about Centratel. Did they take the time to look at the website? Did they take the time to investigate? And why do you want to work here? What brought you to this town you say you’re a newcomer to this town? Why are you here? Where you hope to be with Centratel in five years? Are you here just for a paycheck?

We ask questions that direct and that puts people on the edge to the point where they have to be honest. So many people go into an interview and this is another thing we understand, so many people go into an interview as if it’s a game. And I’ve had this happen over and over again where the challenge from the other side is to be hired.

“I’m going to convince this employer to hire me.” And then once they’re hired they’re not so interested with the job anymore.

Susan: Then every body looking for the other one.

Sam: Right. They’re ready for the next challenge. So we ask questions that will expose the real reasons they’re there, and do they really need a job? Another thing is we don’t hire part time people at all. We want a full time people that will take the job seriously and the paycheck seriously. And who will be there 40 hours a week, and develop some expertise and whatever their position is going to be with the company.

So we get underneath and we ask these questions. It’s in the book.

Susan: Sure, okay.

Sam: But we get underneath and ask.

Susan: It really gets a sense.

Sam: What are the systems driving this person to be sitting here today? Were they on time? If they’re not on time they’re probably not going to get the job. We don’t mind if they’re late as long as they call and say they’re going to be late. If they got lost, they have a problem at home, but if they come wandering in 20 minutes late this kind of a waste of time.

Susan: They are not much interested in the job. You could assume that anyway.

Sam: Well, it could be that or it could be there discombobulated. They have a problem with time and they have I mean there could be any anyone of those problems would be a problem in their position with the company.

Susan: Sure it’s an important element. We did a story actually on the situational interviews and the reason we did that is we found and I think you’re actually saying that there’s a lot of people who are just good interviewers or interviewees but they’re really not the right talent for the job.

Sam: Exactly.

Susan: Right.

Sam: Exactly, that’s the hurdle that the employer needs to get by.

Susan: Let me ask you though let’s go back to the I.Q. test and the drug testing. You don’t perform those yourself in house. Do you use a service or how do you do that?

Sam: We actually do them in house.

Susan: Okay.

Sam: And the $9.00 for a kit, and we do them randomly. And when I say we do random drug test of all our employees three times a year. We take everybody and everybody gets testing. We don’t picked this personnel or that personnel, but we do them in house and if there’s a question we send them down to the professionals at emergency care and we pay $40 and they do the full screen, blood test. In a few times we had problems the professional supported our conclusions.

Susan: Okay. Then that’s important. I mean you really do you have to take that extra to protect yourself.

Sam: Exactly, and it is a saliva test. It’s clean and sanitary and there’s no embarrassment about it. Everybody knows.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: And everybody, our employees are 30 employees we’re glad we do it because as soon as somebody comes in with that kind of a problem they don’t fit in.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: They just even if we don’t know what the problem was. They just probably not going to fit. There’s going to be problems.

Susan: Now Sam I’m actually going to switch gears just a tiny bit. We’ve talked about job description. You talked about the importance of a new hire. We talked about that giving them the documentation, but let me flip this around. Let’s say that you’re the manager or you’re the business owner and I work for you, and I recognized the importance of exactly what Sam Carpenter’s saying. How would I get you to buy into writing this documentation and having the job descriptions put in place?

Sam: Thank you for bringing this up Susan and I’m so glad to go over this part a bit. So up until now and this segment the viewer maybe thinking, “Oh great, so this is Sam Carpenter guys going to write of all these instructions and everybody out there is going to just follow them exactly. And it’s not at all the way it happens.

At first I did most of the documentation as we developed the work the system method, but now 98% of the documentation is performed by the employees. And why well they make about double what they make anywhere else. And they don’t work over 40 hours a week. It’s a nice place to work.

So here’s what happens. Let’s say there’s a procedure with 23 steps to do the deposit okay. So one of my managers who is doing the deposit says, “Well, this changed over here step seven is just stupid. We don’t need to do it anymore.” So they will come to me in the office. It might maybe on the hallway and say, “You know the step seven for this reason is just dump.” And then I might check with somebody else, so the three of us will get together. We talk about it. And then that cash and concrete you will not deviate from the procedure. That procedure is changed instantly.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: So it’s cash and concrete.

Susan: Flexible.

Sam: It is like a transformer. Remember the movie? The kid story, and that the characters will—its still and it’s hard a bit but it’s really different.

Susan: Right.

Sam: So we like to think of our procedures as being cash and concrete, but we’ll be able to change them in a snap of a finger. No bureaucracy involved. We’ll change it for the better, and so employees know that these procedures can be change instantly with their input and there’s another word empowerment.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: But it makes them understand that they have a say in there. And also everybody knows I don’t do the documentation anymore. It will go through me a lot of times.

Susan: Sure.

Sam: The important ones to make sure it’s following our strategic objective because it’s up to me as CEO the key things going on a straight line, but they know that when they have input it will be instantly recognize and then all probability. The 90% of the time whose recommendations will happen and somebody actually we’ll meet in the hallway we agreed to change it. They go right to the computer and changing.

Susan: And change the right term in there.

Sam: And distribute the hard copy that everybody and it’s done.

Susan: Well, you know it is so important that people feel invested and feel like they have a voice.

Sam: Right.

Susan: Regardless of what type of business or industry you’re in.

Sam: Of course.

Susan: So, absolutely. Well, Sam I tell you. You really know what you’re talking about, and I have learned so much already from this series and I really appreciate you being part of the team here.

Sam: Well, I’m flattered and I thank you very much.

Susan: Great and let’s mention your website again to because you can downloaded the information there I know, so that is called.

Sam: That’s a good download, workthesytem.com.

Susan: Right.

Sam: And that’s where they get the book until this winter while the book is in book stores.

Susan: And we’ll be looking forward to that absolutely.

Sam: Thank you.

Susan: Thank you and thanks to all of you for watching us here today. Sam Carpenter on our featured advisor series. Be sure to check out other segments and great advice from Sam as well as our other featured advisors on our featured advisor channel. And once again, thanks for watching. We’re SBTV.com where small business is our only business.

Transcription by: Scribe4you Transcription Services