Don’t Hire to Fire: Secrets to Getting and Keeping Top Performers…®

“Time spent on hiring is time well spent,” according to Robert Half, the founder of Robert Half & Associates.

We at Incedo Group so strongly believe in Robert Half’s words that we have dedicated an entire e-book to the subject of hiring.  The articles and Top 10 lists contained in this eBook address the various components of hiring, including retention and firing, and offer you the necessary tools to help your business grow and prosper.  With every major decision, and hiring is no exception, comes a significant time investment.  Our goal at Incedo Group is to help you invest your time wisely so that hiring does not prove futile, frustrating, or fatal.

This is the first paragraph of our eBook, Don’t Hire to Fire:  Secrets to Getting and Keeping Top Performers.® The topic of interviewing, hiring and retaining staff is one that creeps into almost every business conversation.  How do you interview and really get to know someone?  What questions do you ask to determine if they will be successful in your company?  Everyone puts their best foot forward in interviews so how do you, the interviewer, ‘get behind the resume’?  Is there a difference in how you interview superstars?  And if hiring successfully is the first step, then retaining top performers is vital to your long term success.

Everyone wants the secret to successful hiring, and I am often asked to provide that information.  My clients believe that with a background of 25 successful years in the recruiting business I have the answers on how to interview to ensure successful hires.  I admit that my track record as a recruiter was noteworthy.  Statistics such as interview to hire ratio, tenure and offer to acceptance ratio are what I used as my performance metrics for success.  What were mine?  Interview to hire was 1.5:1, tenure was over 6 ½ years and offer to acceptance was almost 1:1.  I’m not sharing these stats in order to brag, but to demonstrate that I do indeed know a bit about how to interview and hire successfully.

Hiring is one of the most difficult tasks any business owner or leader faces.  Yet many leaders simply do not know how to interview effectively and how to uncover the critical aspects of the candidate’s skills, experience, background and personality that will give them the information they need to determine if the person they are interviewing has high potential for being successful.  Too often we don’t ask the right questions, we get responses but don’t ask additional questions for clarification, we accept what we think we heard (or want to hear) or we don’t really know how to get to know ‘who’ the person is we are interviewing…rather than just what they want us to know.

At times we need to hire someone because our need to fill a position is so great that we ignore what our instincts tell us and hire someone we don’t think is quite right.  Then we spend months attempting to get their performance to a level we want, frustrated constantly, having lots of conversations about this person, and sometimes eventually terminate them.  Sadly, there are times when we simply come to accept mediocrity and just live with it.  It makes me (and I hope you) cringe when you read this.

Other times we hire brilliantly and the person is truly a superstar.  Their performance is exceptional, their attitude stellar and everyone likes them.  We pat ourselves on the back for our brilliance, and forget or ignore that keeping these top performers is as critical as hiring them in the first place.

This whole process…interviewing, hiring, retaining… is challenging and yet it is the single biggest factor in the success or failure of any company.  Even if you are first to market with a product or service, someone will soon be nipping at your heels.  You can’t keep competitors from stealing your ideas.  But you can keep competitors at bay and you and your company can be leading the pack and that starts with having the right people on board.

In Don’t Hire to Fire:  Secrets to Getting and Keeping Top Performers® we provide you with ideas, insights, tools and how to’s about interviewing, hiring and retaining top performers.  This isn’t another book on interview questions to ask.  It’s a book that delves into the interview process from a holistic viewpoint.  What makes an interview successful?  How to use interviewing to brand your company,  knowing if you are ready to hire, reading between the lines on a resume and much, much more.

If you have ever asked yourself, “How can I consistently hire top performers?”, then this ebook is for you.  If you question how you’ll know during an interview whether someone will be successful in your company, order this ebook.  If you believe that people are your competitive advantage then wait no longer.

Order Don’t Hire to Fire® today.  You won’t be disappointed.

Don’t Hire to Fire:  Secrets to Getting and Keeping Top Performers® ($19.95)