Hi! I’m Jim Muehlhausen author of the 51 Fatal Business Errors and the Eight CEO Secrets.
How do you immunize your company from employee turn-over? For most positions if you hire experienced people, you’re really hiring your competitor rejects. Yes, I know you don’t believe me, but yes I think I can prove it. Every CEO wants to hire the perfectly qualified person for the position; this typically means the employee has done the job before. Well, where do we get these people from? Our competitors, of course, so when you hire the perfect person from the competition, I believe that most of the time you’re hiring a reject. Here’s why. If you’re a chemical distributor needing an accounts payable person with SAP experience, who do you want to hire? Well, someone with chemical experience, accounts payable experience and SAP experience, right? Well it seems perfectly logical, but it’s a recipe for disaster. The reason that this plan is a disaster is an incorrect assumption that you’re making. And here’s what it is. That assumption is that your competitor will let a truly great employee leave. Quality employee retention is important to everyone, yourself and your competitors.
So, picture this, here’s Sally, a 10 year tenured payables clerk, she’s a truly great employee, that apartment would fall apart without Sally. One day, Sally walks in your office and says, “Hey, Mr. CEO I love working here, you’re the best boss I could ever ask for, I always figured I’d retire from here. Hey, listen I don’t want you to take this as a shake down, but ABC Company offered me a job for a $1.50 an hour more. Now, normally I would’ve told them no but my boy’s kind of sick and we really need the money. Now I just wanted to thank you for everything that you’ve done for me and I want to let you know that I’ll be leaving in two weeks.” Now come on, be realistic, if this situation happened to you, what would you do?
Now some of you will disagree with me but 80% of the people watching this would follow the most basic employee retention strategy ever and pay Sally a $1.50 more an hour rather than have their payables department fall apart. You lose a lot if you lose Sally, you lose 10 years experience in competence, you lose 10 years of training Sally, you lose Sally’s relationship with your vendors, Sally’s relationship with your customers. So what do you do? Well you hang on to Sally for dear life, and guess what, so will your competitors with their version of Sally. You’re deluding yourself if you think that the person that you’re interviewing is one of these great employees. The fact that the employee is sitting right in front of you means that the “Please don’t leave Sally.” conversation did not happen with their boss. Therefore, guess who you’re talking to? You’re talking to someone that the competitor did not try to keep, a reject, right? That that person was a reject. Put it in other way, your competitor did have an employee retention strategy with that person it was, “Let them go. Get them out of here.” Quite simply you’re better off not to hire from your competitors.
Now I realized that there are exceptions to my story, everybody’s had one, a failed business owner, a competitor going out of business, etc. etc. Hey I’ll take all of those employees that I can get, but they are the exception not the rule. Pretending these anomalies will repeat over and over again is not a good a plan. I believe we should completely give up on this hope and start with inexperienced, high aptitude employees instead and train the daylights out of them. It’s a much better and more successful plan; it’s also a cheaper plan.
So, to learn more about this CEO Secret, along with the 7 others, go down to the bottom of the page, put in your first name and your e-mail, and I’ll send you the 8 CEO Secrets. I look forward to talking to you on the next page.
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