Hiring the right people is important then, and it's not necessarily something that we do well naturally. How can we make sure we actually do hire the right people? Well, basically, we want to follow a structured process. That process really has three components. Identifying the criteria, figuring out what is it that we're really looking for. Then when we know what it is we're looking for, evaluating candidates. Trying to figure out, out of all of the people who applied, how do they rate on the criteria that we say are important to us? Then the third piece, which I want to spend some time talking about, is then thinking, they've scored differently on these different criteria, how do we bring those scores together, and decide who to hire? Let's start, though, with the first piece. Identifying criteria. What are we looking for? In principle, this is very simple. When we make any decision, the first step in a sensible decision-making process is figuring out what defines whether it's a successful decision. In this case, what we're really asking ourselves is, what makes for a high-performance? I mean, many ways the entire hiring process can be thought of as trying to predict performance, trying to figure out all of the people who are applying, which ones are going to be the highest performers. What we're trying to figure out is how all of the characteristics that somebody could have, which ones do the best job of predicting whether or not they will do well here. Usually, what we'll do is we'll go, we'll look at the people who work for us, and we'll ask ourselves, okay, some of these are high performers, some of these are low performers. What differentiates them? What are the attributes that our high performers have, that seem to be lacking on low performers? What are some of the characteristics of a low performance that contributes to that low performance, that we don't see in a high-performance? Let's look for people who don't have those characteristics. Figuring out those attributes is important. To take one example, let's talk about [inaudible]. I realized that in this course, what I'm really doing is, running through a variety of random retail chains that I'm familiar with. I promise you, none of them are paying me for product placement or anything like that, though that may say more about my lack of commercial acumen than it does my integrity. But nonetheless, another example that I want to talk about is [inaudible]. [inaudible] , a very successful chain selling sandwiches, coffee, and the like in the UK. I have to say, I particularly enjoy their, it was a posh cheddar and pickle sandwich. They recently started opening branches in the US, and I was really disappointed to see that sandwich did not make it to the US. Very good at customer service, but apparently their product selection in the US is still a bit dicey, or may be digressing. Basic point is [inaudible] , very good at customer service. How does that feed through into how they hire people? Turns out when they hire, what they say they look for are three things. They look for passion, clear talking, and teamwork. Because the way that their stores are set up, where they really want to be moving people through fast but with a friendly experience, they find that these the pieces, that are most important for them. It turns out, other things you might think we're born-like, ability to make coffee, or make sandwiches. Making the sandwiches in the store, you'd think that would matter. But no, they say those are things that we can actually train for. That's not so hard. Whether or not somebody comes in with these attitudes, that really makes a difference for us. You actually see this in quite a lot of high-performing organizations. This sense of we're going to hire for attitude, train for skill. As we'll see later, that does depend both on the success of your training programs, and also on your ability to manage down attrition. But you can certainly do that. But either way, what they have done is sat down and figured out, what is it that we need people to be able to do, to be successful here? There are many ways that you can try and do this trying to figure out your criteria. One of my favorite examples of this comes from JetBlue, which is an airline in the US. One of the questions they were wondering was, what should we be looking for when we hire our flight attendants? You could imagine, maybe I want flight attendants who are really friendly. The people who give you big smile when you all come on the plane, say, how are you doing, good at making conversation with customers, that can be important. Or maybe we want people who are helpful. Really make sure you get your bag up, ensure you had lock out, all of those things. Which is more important? I don't know. They didn't really know they were having an argument about this. What they said was, let's go find out. What they ended up doing, was actually running a survey of customers, where they would ask in the survey like, tell about your flight attendant on this flight, how friendly were they, how helpful were they, and those things. Then they would also ask them about their general experience and how likely they would be to recommend JetBlue to a friend. It turns out when they did this, they found that people were more likely to say they had a good experience, and more likely to recommend JetBlue to a friend, when the flight attendant had been rated as high on being helpful. In this case, it seemed being helpful was actually more valuable. That's a nice example of really going out and doing just that extra piece of work to try and figure out when we go out and hire, what is important here. That's always going to be the first step because unless we know what makes somebody successful in this organization, we can't go out and try and look for it when we're hiring.
