Susan Wilson Solovic: Hiring and retaining the right employees for business can be a challenge with the right people you will reach your business goals faster and more cost effectively, but with small business such employing 50% of the country’s private sector workforce and representing 99.7% of all employer firms the competition for finding, hiring and retaining top candidates such fears.
Our guest today has some experience and tips to offer on attaining the best performers for your organization. Andrew Field founded PrintingForLess.com and quickly made it into one of the nation’s fastest growing companies. His leadership has been recognized with numerous business awards including winning workplaces, Best Boss Awards. His company has also been recognized as one of the Best on the web. Welcome Andrew, thanks for joining us today.
Andrew Field: It’s good to be here.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Tell us how do you create such an effective hiring process?
Andrew Field: It takes a lot of work. We actually did a key for fulltime people to our hiring process and we’re not that big of a company. We’re under 200 people still. One of the things it starts with is doing enough advertising to guarantee a really good flow of resumes, and you have to have a lot of them coming in all the time to be able to pick among the best. The next day is to pre-screen which we do and the pre-screen is that first 15 or 20 minute phone call to just sort clear up a few details and find out if there communicative, and if they even really represent the basic that are on their resume.
And then comes what we call the long pre-screen and it can be up to a three hour interview either on phone or in person with one of our HR professionals. And they go over the history of every job that person had. What they would hire to do? How they did? The high points, the low points and then why they’re not there anymore. And the follow-up to those questions is one of the most important things that you can do in the process. If someone says, “I had a disagreement with the boss.” You can’t just say, “Oh, fine and move on.” You have to have them describe that and you’ll be amazed that what comes out.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That’s very interesting. Quick question before we move on. You said you have to advertise a lot of places. Do you do any online advertising for candidate?
Andrew Field: Absolutely, we used all the big and some of the small online venues. One of the good things for people to remember would be to use something associated with your industry, so in the printing industry we’re not only on the general ones like Yahoo jobs and Monster and Hotjobs and Career Builder. We’re also on some specific ones for our industry and that often is where people within a given industry we’re going to look first for a new position.
Susan Wilson Solovic: When you are reviewing these candidates and I know you have a very extensive projects like four or 50 hours per candidate. How do you really pinpoint the final decision that best employee?
Andrew Field: The final decision comes down to after the initial interview and then the three-hour pre-screen. If they make it that far they come in for an all day interview and we make them survive the entire day with teams of two to their extensive process and at the end everybody gets a vote. And people have to rank them against the various hiring criteria which includes both attitude and cultural fit issues as well as the specific skills, so for instance our front line people who are customer facing they better be cheerful because those are tough jobs on the front lines. We also do technical assessments as well as other things to try to really get a feel for whose going to be best.
And one of the good things about being a high growth company is we don’t have to say I have three great candidates I’m going to only pick the best one. If we have three great candidates we’ll hire all three.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Good for you. I might apply for a job with your company.
Andrew Field: Bring it on.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Alright, what about once you made that decision to hire an employee as small business just find we’re not just small business, but all companies find that there’s sometimes a very quick turn over and that person isn’t the right fit. What do you do to make sure that employees stays after that hiring decisions been made.
Andrew Field: Here’s one thing we’ve found great people A players try them on feedback. They want to be toward exactly what’s expected of them in their position and then they want that feedback on how they’re doing with regard to what’s expected of them. So for most positions at two weeks, four weeks, eight weeks, 12 weeks, and I think again, it’s six months we give them very clear feedback often saying, “Here’s what expected of you, and here or here or here is where you are, and here’s what you need to do to continue to do well or to continue to keep your job.” And we find that the very best people just crave that feedback and we have a very structured system for giving it.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And does that help you personally reduce your turnover in your company?
Andrew Field: Its done an enormous amount of fit for that. We used to have people who would sometimes quit and then the exit interview. They would say, “Oh, I was doing so terribly I knew you’re going to fire me.” And we looked at it and said, “They were doing fine.” And realize that we had a whole we need to fill which is giving great feedback.
Susan Wilson Solovic: There are a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners because you’re the founder and you feel like nobody else can do this quite as good as I can. What advice would you give to someone not to micromanage their employees?
Andrew Field: You’re onto something big there. It’s one of the hardest things to do is to let somebody else do a job that you think you could do better than they’re going to do, but of course you can’t do all the jobs and you can’t grow. The average printing company in the US is well under 10 million dollars a year on revenues. I think partly because people just won’t let go, so give people a great view of the principles and the big picture was expected them. Give the measurements and time period so that they can know what they have to do by when. Give them great tools, give them good training and then get out of the way and let them do their thing.
Susan Wilson Solovic: With such a fast growth company as you have and you’re sort of under 200 employees, but that’s a lot of employees. How do you staying in touch with your employee based?
Andrew Field: One of the things I tried to do is stay in touch with my customer based and my customers will tell me about what’s really going on with the employees.
Susan Wilson Solovic: I see.
Andrew Field: So I tried to answer a few phone calls everyday from customers. I’m on the general ring and you hear a lot from customers. Most of it in our case is very, very good. We also do some informal things we have parties and picnics and fun of dance and there’s a bicycle people can ride around inside. And you know you get to know people’s dogs name when they bring to work and that sort of thing. I also have some structured periods where for instance I meet with our team leads who are leads of the three person customer service teams. One on one or in groups without their direct manager involve so I sort to skip a line and that gives them an opportunity to give straight feedback to me.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Now Andrew one of my beliefs is every company needs a pink Cadillac. You know Mary Kay and they covered it pink Cadillac. What about recognitioning your company? How do you recognize your company or your employees?
Andrew Field: You know I think the best recognition is personal and it’s meaningful to people because it is personal. And depending on what matters to that person is what you do, so for instance if we have a woman who is a big horse fan and she loves horses. If she does really well we might get her print of a horse or something like that or if she lands a big sale or gets a great rate from a customer, and I think that the very best feedback and the best recognition you can give isn’t a cookie cutter, but it’s a one off special thing and that’s what we try to do.
Susan Wilson Solovic: That’s a great idea. Earlier you mentioned something about exit interviews. How useful do you find those and have you ever been able to turn the situation around and actually salvage an employee?
Andrew Field: I’ve never salvage anybody from an exit interview, but usually by that time you’re not really trying to. This is a very, very tight labor market, and I think anybody whose an employee today wants to be for the most part because the unemployment rate is so low, and we all have to recognized that talented people have a lot of choices. We don’t have chance on them they can go lots of places even in Montana there’s a very good job opportunities, so the very best thing that we try to do to keep our turn over low is to provide meaningful work to provide challenging opportunities and to provide a fun workplace.
Susan Wilson Solovic: Oh, that’s great. Well, I can understand why you won the Winning Workplaces, Best Boss Awards, so congratulations to you.
Andrew Field: Thank you.
Susan Wilson Solovic: And of course we’ve been talking to Andrew Field, the President and CEO of PrintingForLess.com. We appreciate your being here Andrew. And if you’d like to learn more about Andrew and his company go to PrintingForLess.com. You’re watching SBTV.com where small business is our only business.
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