re: People - A company's greatest asset

jointer — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 21:36:21 GMT

Adam, I wholeheartedly endorse your views on people. It is all too easy to focus on technical skills and not pay enough attention to the "quality" of the person. I have put "quality" in quotes quite deliberately because it is truly often hard to define. As someone who, as part of my engineering career, has hired (and fired) a large number of people, I could not give you a logical explanation for every hire that I have made. Some are "gut" based and how one quantifies that I am not sure.

In my case, fortunately, I could probably count the number of people on one hand chosen on that basis that turned out to be a dud. Engineering being very cyclic they didn't usually last too long! On the other hand a significant number of the people hired in an upturn in business were not those who were de-hired in a downturn. In other words you should always shrink to "strength".

Very often what happens is the opposite and there is a tendency to keep the same people who have been "around" for some time. I have heard many times, "We cannot afford the redundancy costs of letting certain people go". Whilst every case must be treated on its merits, I would argue that you cannot afford to keep them in the longer term if they are costing you money and possibly lost opportunity. Yes, it is a hard world and no matter how many times I faced having to let people go, it never got any easier, especially when some of them had been "around" for 15 to 20 years!

Perhpas the most extreme hiring example in my case was a gentleman who had just arrived in Canada from Malaysia. He sent me this scruffy handwritten one page resume and some samples of his work. The resume was virtually useless but something (who knows what!) made me look at his work. Ordinarily I would have filed him in the WPB (waste paper bin) without hesitation and I don't know to this day why I didn't. I was impressed with the samples of his work and hired him in a junior position (just being cautious). That was a big mistake; not because he was no good. He was an "ace"; a "diamond in the rough"! My mistake meant that I just couldn't promote him fast enough. I had a constant battle with HR because he didn't "fit the norm".

The other side of this coin is "quality" management. You can have the "best" people but if you cannot get the "best" from them then you still have a problem. I don't propose to go into that here. In fact by a strange coincidence thoughts about that topic have been running through my head recently and I might just post on that. Why that should be the case I really don't know because I am no longer in a management position. Maybe those guys in "white coats" are getting closer by the minute :).

Cheers
Graham Jones