How to Hire Great People: Fix Your Hiring System Before You Post the Job

Almost every owner I sit down with says some version of the same sentence: I cannot find good people. I have heard it in every market and every economy for over forty years. A listener recently asked me the practical version: where do I find people to hire? I answer that below. But I think it is the wrong place to start.

Good people exist. They are working somewhere today, and great people get recruited every day by somebody. So the better question is harder: why would a great person want to come and work for you? It stops being about the labor market and starts being about your organization.

I have hired hundreds of people over my career. Some went on to pass me and run companies. A few were terrible hires, and some of those were entirely my fault. What I eventually learned is that hiring is rarely the problem. Most companies have a people system problem, and hiring is just where we finally notice it.

Do you need another person, or do you have a broken process?

Before you write a job posting, answer this one. It will save some of you a lot of money, because hiring always feels like progress while it quietly hides the real problem. Here is the pattern:

• You hire a second estimator instead of fixing estimating. Now two people produce inconsistent estimates.
• You hire a second manager instead of building a schedule template. Now two people fight fires instead of one.
• You hire office help instead of fixing communication. The new person becomes a human patch over holes nobody looked at.
• You hire another salesperson instead of fixing follow-up. You added a second person converting badly.

Sometimes another employee is a very expensive way to hide a broken system. I am not saying never hire. Look at the process for a week or two first. If it is sound and you are truly at capacity, hire with confidence.

What numbers should you check before adding payroll?

Most hiring decisions in small business are made on a feeling. It feels busy. It feels like the superintendent is overloaded. Turn the feeling into a measurement first:

• Backlog. Six months of signed work is a hiring case. Six weeks and a hopeful pipeline is hope.
• Revenue and profit per employee. Annual figures divided by headcount, tracked over time. If revenue per employee is falling, another hire makes it worse.
• Operational capacity. How many homes can one superintendent manage and still hold your quality standard? Not the most they can tolerate before they quit. The number where the work stays good.

If you do not know these numbers, every hiring decision is a guess. It is about a week of effort, and it turns a $50,000 decision into an informed one.

The signs that it really is time show up before the crisis: overtime that has become normal, customers waiting longer, slipping quality (watch warranty numbers), leaders doing everyone else's job, and one person who has become the bottleneck. Hire before the organization breaks. Panic hiring is where bad hires come from.

How do you define a position before you hire?

Do not hire a title. Hire an outcome. Most job descriptions are a list of verbs: manages construction, oversees subcontractors, coordinates schedules. If someone did every one of those and the houses still closed late and over budget, would they have done the job? Yes. That is the problem.

A job description made up of verbs cannot be failed, cannot be measured, and so cannot be managed.

Instead ask what results this person owns. For a construction manager that might be completing on time against the schedule template, hitting the gross margin goal on every job and reducing warranty cost per home. Outcomes can be coached. They also change the interview: you stop asking whether someone has done this job and start asking about a time they were responsible for a number like this.

I like to put every seat on a responsibility map: a picture of the seats in your company, who sits in each, who it reports to and what it owns. Seats, not names. Each seat needs seven things:

1. Purpose, in one sentence. If you cannot write it, the seat is probably two jobs.
2. Responsibilities, the ongoing work.
3. Expected outcomes, the results.
4. Measurements, the numbers that tell you it is working.
5. Authority, what this person can decide alone.
6. Decision limits, what they can spend, approve and must escalate, with dollar figures.
7. Communication rhythm, who they meet with, how often and why.

Authority is missing from most job descriptions I read, and it causes more frustration than anything else. People do not usually quit over responsibility. They quit over responsibility without authority.

Where do you find great employees? Seven places

Here is the answer to the listener's question. Notice that only one of the seven is a job posting.

1. Your own employees. Great people know great people. Pay a real referral bonus in two parts, at hire and after 90 days, and ask your top three people face to face who they would bring in. If referrals go quiet, you just learned something about your culture.
2. Vendors, trades and suppliers. The most underused source in the industry. Suppliers, bankers and architects know who is good, and who is unhappy.
3. Competitors. Not raiding. Build relationships so that when someone decides it is time for a change, you are the name that comes to mind.
4. Industry associations. The value is being in the room repeatedly. I have hired people I first met at an association event.
5. LinkedIn. Postings reach only people actively looking. Posting about what you are learning builds relationships, and people who follow your thinking arrive half convinced.
6. Colleges, trade schools and the military. Grow your own. Internships and apprenticeships take patience, but companies that do this stop having a hiring problem in about three to five years.
7. Your customers. Someone who went through your process and liked you enough to recommend you already knows your culture.

Six of the seven are relationships and one is an advertisement. Great people are not found. They are known before you need them. The best time to build your pipeline is a year before you need to hire.

What does a good interview process look like?

In most small companies the process is a resume, a pleasant hour of conversation and a gut feeling. That is a feeling with a start date. Some of the best interviewers I have met were among the worst employees I hired. Use a sequence, in this order:

1. Phone screen of at least 20 minutes. Do not fall in love over the phone.
2. Assessment, such as DISC. Not pass or fail. It shows how someone is wired, which tells you what to probe.
3. Structured interview: the same core questions, in the same order, for every candidate.
4. Values interview, ideally with a different person: a time they disagreed with their boss, a mistake that cost money.
5. Skills interview run by someone who does the job.
6. Reference calls, actually made. Ask: would you hire this person again? Then be quiet and listen.
7. A small real assignment. Have an estimator price a small scope or a superintendent walk a job and write the punch list. You will learn more than from three interviews.

A process like this does one thing above all: it makes emotion show its work. You still have the gut feeling, but now you reconcile it against evidence.

How do you know it is the right person? Character first

My list, refined over a lot of years and a fair number of mistakes: character (do they tell the truth when it costs them, and can they take feedback without defending), ownership, integrity in small things, curiosity, communication, work ethic paired with judgment, humility and a positive attitude.

Technical skills can usually be taught. Character usually cannot.

Every painful hire I have made was someone I hired for a skill while ignoring a character signal I had noticed and explained away, because I needed the seat filled. Every one.

Why do good employees leave? Fix retention before recruiting

If you have a retention problem, hiring better only refills a leaking bucket faster. People rarely leave for money alone. Money is what they say in the exit interview because it is polite and safe. Underneath it is usually poor leadership, unclear expectations, no growth path, no appreciation, no accountability (they watched someone underperform for two years with no consequences) or chaos. Gallup's long-running engagement research keeps finding that the manager and immediate environment are among the strongest drivers of whether someone stays.

If good people keep leaving, the market is not the problem. That is the best news in this episode, because the market is not something you control, but your environment is. What keeps people: purpose (you are building where a family brings a baby home, so say it out loud), growth, specific and timely recognition, autonomy with clear outcomes, and a team that is visibly winning.

Your homework this week

1. Identify the one role that is becoming a bottleneck.
2. Write it as outcomes, not activities. If you catch yourself writing manages, oversees or coordinates, stop.
3. List five measurable results that person should own.
4. Ask your top three people, in person, whether they know someone who fits your culture. Watch their reaction.
5. Spend 30 minutes improving one internal process before you post another opening.

There are no neutral hires. Every person you bring on either strengthens your culture or weakens it, so choose carefully. The choices you make today create the organization you will lead tomorrow.