Special Report
Passionate people
How to hire people who will get excited about coming to work
By Kristy J. O’Hara
Smart Business San Diego | August 2009
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Shawn Parr, CEO, Bulldog Drummond Inc.
What gets you out of bed in the morning? It’s a simple question, but it’s one that Shawn Parr thinks is critical in gauging somebody’s passion — whether it’s a client, a vendor or an employee.
The reason he asks that simple question is that he wants to know what matters to you because passion is important in running a successful business.
“If you have a very clear purpose — people know what it is you’re doing as a company — and you exude a level of passion for the business you’re in, then those two things help you determine who you want to hire,” the CEO says.
Parr strives to hire people who will be passionate about his advertising company, Bulldog Drummond Inc., which had $15 million in billings last year. If they’re passionate about the company, then that will translate to how they work with clients.
Smart Business spoke with Parr about how he hires passionate people for his company.
Be genuine. Be really interested in the people that you’re hiring and give them a reason to be really interested in you and the company.
Show a genuine respect and fascination for that person in the half an hour or an hour that they’re with you and understand their strengths and what it is they love about what it is they do. If you’re looking at a person’s portfolio or you’re looking at their career history, really use those things to understand their passion and their reason for getting up every day.
Spend time with people. When we hire someone, they get interviewed by just about every department in the company. We take a nontraditional approach. There’s a traditional approach to interviewing — references, body of work and experiences — and then we try to understand a deeper level.
We interview two or three times before we hire, and we’re very respectful of people’s time, but … if they want to work at Bulldog and we’re really interested in that person, we take the time to get to know each other interviewing a potential new member of the team. It’s the same dynamic of building a relationship with somebody over time. You’re not a friend, but you have aspects of friendship.
You have to understand the person before you can actually add them to the team. And they need to understand you as people, and we like to try to give employees an opportunity to meet the different individuals that they may work with in the organization as opposed to, ‘This is the head of production, this is the head of strategy, this is the head of accounting.’ We like to have people relate together as people.
At the end of that, we’re able to form a very clear opinion as a group that this person is passionate and seems to be very heartfelt and genuine, and then the person that you’re interviewing has the ability to say, ‘I understand the culture at a deeper level, and I understand the type of people that are working here.’
