Fast Lane
Interviewing in depth
How to hire the right employees
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business Akron/Canton | June 2009
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Tim French, co-founder and CEO, The French Co.
Tim French takes his time when filling an open position, because hiring quickly can have disastrous results.
When the CEO of The French Co. needs to fill a spot on his roster of more than 100 employees, it takes him months to assure a good fit. And to make sure he gets it right, those he hires have usually survived several interviews and undergone tests analyzing critical thinking, skills and personality.
“Someone who is a great worker, with great skill sets, can be very disruptive if they don’t fit with your culture,” says French, who co-founded the retail maintenance service company with his wife, Donna.
Smart Business spoke with French about how to choose the right employee to fit your business.
Q. How do you determine whether a candidate is a good fit?
You can look at their resume and ask very specific questions to figure out whether or not they are misleading you in the resume.
If they’ve alluded to a grade point average from college, I’ll ask for verification of that. Most employers don’t do that, but I figure that’s a great place to start to see whether or not they’re misleading.
The other thing that we look at is, history repeats itself. If the applicant has done a great job in the past and it can be proved through results, then they’re most likely to continue that with your company. If that isn’t the case and you can’t prove what they’ve done in the past, it is likely they won’t deliver results.
Q. How do you verify a job candidate’s past performance?
It can be exhaustive. It goes down to in-depth interviews with past supervisors, and we’ll go as far as we can, interviewing customers and vendors they have interacted with. We start with the resume to try to qualify what’s on the resume, as well as what they’ve told us in the interview.
Generally, what we find is if there are some exaggerations or misinformation in one area, we’re going to find that in all areas. If there is total trustworthiness, it generally will play out through all of the research that we do.
It can take several months to hire a new staff member. They’ll go through as many as four or five interviews with senior management and the hiring manager, and we put them through a series of tests, including critical thinking tests and skills tests.
What our employees who have joined us have told us is it’s the most exhaustive interview hiring process they’ve ever seen, but they’re really glad we do it because it produces really good hires.
