A8. Is Hiring Skills essential to have your 1st Million?

Another important concept that is focussed by many other business trainers is to form a good team or train people to hire good people to run business successfully.

How important are Hiring skills and what they really are?

Despite of having experience of hiring 1000s of staff  and taken interviews of over 10,000 people, I think, I still don’t have this skill- how to hire people?

As In Singapore especially as private SME:

            We don’t hire staff-rather staff choose us?

If so, what hiring skill we need.

            How loyal is staff?

In many cases loyalty cost is just $100(or 10-20% in general) - someone pays more and buys it.

And how many resumes has real skill set stated

How many resumes has stated all reason of leaving past jobs honestly (less than 20%)

How many people will give you honest reason when they intend to leave you (very few)?

Especially in countries like Singapore, Employers do not hire Employees! Rather, Employees decide if they choose to work with them.

So as an employer how do you choose your employees?

Are you able to choose the best ones from the available pool of applicants?

Probably not.

As an employer you just have to offer your jobs to those people who has responded to your advertisement and chances are that they will then accept or reject you. So, it is the other way around. The employees are more empowered than the employers when it comes to job vacancies.

Even when employers have selected someone for the job, there is no guarantee that the newly selected persons will turn up for the job on joining date despite signing a black and white contract or even if joined, will continue for a prolonged period. Leave aside their real skill set of on the job performance issue, that is yet another dimension to explore.

It is possible that employers in other countries are also facing similar problems of manpower shortages.

Employers in third World or heavily populated countries may not be facing the same challenges and their experiences may be different.

So, the important question comes up that what is the use of having very good hiring skills if we end up having to choose from a limited pool of people who are in a more empowered position to choose not to work with you anytime, if they so desire.

The ones you are left working for you may thus not be the best candidates in terms of both quality and quantity (or might be too costly if you still want them).

As a business owner, then you will have to ask yourself how you would run your business in that situation as you may not have enough manpower and even if you do have the required head count, they may not have the right skill sets and the turn over rate may be generally very high.

In Singapore, employees are also used to giving very short notice (one/two day) when they want to terminate their jobs. One day notices are very common and if a person actually calls you on the phone to inform you that they are not coming to work anymore; it is considered that they are already a better employee. .

There are many others who do not even bother to do so and do not even have the basis courtesy to say that they are not turning up for work anymore.

So, as a business owner, how will you have business continuity and meet the expectations of your customers and how will you meet up to all your other obligations with at these odds?

From Fact file of Mr. Gupta:

I have interviewed tens of thousands of people in the course of my business and even till today, I do not think I have any Hiring Skills and I do not know how to acquire them, but business has to go on and I have to make necessary adjustments to make sure that my businesses still goes on.

Even in worst of recession almost every month I was hiring-not because I was doing well-but in the industry I am-is service industry where the turnover of local staff is very high-mainly due to shift or weekend duty needs.

My staff may have 1001 reasons to leave me; ranging from family problems, or personal problems, or better job offers, or even distance traveled to and fro work, or to even study, or go in personal or family tours, or timing issues and even upto extent of having issues with their co-workers or supervisors .and the bosses. Even their dogs may be giving them problems!

But, to me as a boss of the company, I only have ONE reason to hire and retain them and that is to ensure that business continues to run effectively.  I also do not want to get into a cycle of having to hire and re-hire new people for the same position as there is no guarantee that next one is better off.

At the end of the day, employer may have to just accept and work with those who wish to stay with their businesses for some time and they may be even the ‘left-over’ and may not be the best of the candidates for the job.

Even in the production of the first series of My First Million TV Reality Show, there were some contestants who lacked their skills in many areas of competencies; but does that mean that they cannot succeed?

Some of them did not have good presentation skills and some teams did not succeed in hiring people for jobs at the resort, nor were able to succeed in the investment exercises, nor other assignments. But we still chose to work with all of them.

This is where theoretical book knowledge and practical business experience may differ and it is left to the readers to go out there and experience the real working world for a period and then determine if Hiring Skills are really relevant and important.

So the key is NOT in hiring the best talent but to get better work from less talented staff.