pflint

Since starting my career the one thing that has always amazed me is the lack of process and discipline most people put behind the recruiting process. As we all know,  great teams build great companies.  Yet for most companies, even those with seasoned executives and Board members, they treat the recruiting process as a necessary evil.   Having spent many years at Ramsey Beirne Associates working with many of the top tier venture capital firms building the senior management teams at companies like eBay, Netscape, Allaire, Excite, @home, Mapquest and others, combined with my six years at Polaris Venture Partners, I believe that we have a formula for succussfull recruiting.  Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to share aspects of our approach, which will hopefully be helpful.

There is a difference between hiring and recruiting.  If you are building a telesales group,  you are hiring people who can man the phones.  These are not necessarily high impact employees.   A high impact employee can be at any level of the organization, individual contributor or CEO.   These people need to be recruited, not just hired.  Unless you are looking to hire people who are out of work or are “B” players you have to have the mind set that in some ways your company might need them more than they need you.  To recruit high impact employees you need to give them a reason to want to join your company.  Odds are these people are employed, happy, heads down working and not looking for a job.  BTW that is why they are desirable.  You must recruit them.  Sell them on why your company offers them personal and professional rewards.  Put together a process that gives the candidate the ability to learn about you and your business and you the ability to learn about them.  Recruiting great candidates is a team sport.  Involve your management and your Board if appropriate.  This will show the candidate that your company takes the recruiting process seriously and that you work as a team.

There are many aspects of the recruiting process that I would like to cover,  such as how to write an appropriate job description, how to hire an executive recruiter, how to close the candidate and how to do references.  These are all important,  however  I  believe that above all else,  reference checking is critical.  So let me end with the check list that we at Polaris Venture Partners use for candidate reference checks:

1. When doing reference checks, you should be sure to ask the candidate to provide an organizational chart for their most recent jobs, with superiors, peers and subordinates.  Ask the candidate to put current telephone numbers, if available, in boxes.  Don’t rely on the references the candidate gives you.  Of coarse they are going say the person in great

2. Basic questions to cover in the reference interviews:

• Bias: How do they know the candidate?  Is there a personal/friendship?
• Strengths and Weaknesses analysis: Delve deep and follow up any generalized comments by asking for examples.  Also get specific examples of failures and successes.  Everyone wants to give you just the strengths.
• If the candidate is being considered for a more senior role than he has played before, what challenges will he/she face?
• Ability to hire well: Get examples.
• Integrity.  Again, get examples
• Ask the interviewee to confirm the organizational chart supplied by the candidate.
• Get other references, particularly off the candidates list:  Is there anyone who would disagree with the interviewee?  Who else should we talk to?
• The “fishing expedition” question:  Is there anything else that we should know about the candidate?

I hope this is helpful and there will be more to come….

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