Smart Leaders
The right hires
How to find people that best fit your company’s direction
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Los Angeles | November 2009
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Charlene Greene, managing director, True Partners Consulting LLC
If your company is going to live the culture you’ve built, you’re going to need the right employees.
Charlene Greene, the head of Southern California operations for True Partners Consulting LLC — which generated $43 million in systemwide revenue in 2008 — has made that one of her guiding principles when it comes to hiring and staff building.
Greene, who holds the title of managing director in the tax services firm, has helped to design and implement a multiple-stage hiring process for new recruits, which includes activities that challenge each job candidate’s communication skills, team-oriented skills and problem-solving creativity.
“First of all, your goal is to hire people who have similar values,” Greene says. “We have a focus on cooperation and values, and people who don’t really adhere to that don’t last long in the firm. You have to have that mentality coming into the workplace.”
Smart Business spoke with Greene about how you can make the right hires who will help build and promote your company’s culture and core values.
Know what you’re looking for. You have to be careful in hiring. You have to know the characteristics that you want at the outset of the process. Sometimes you’re going to make mistakes, and when that happens, you have to accept that you’ve made a mistake, act to correct it and move on.
If you hire individually on a one-to-one basis, as opposed to in groups, it’s much easier to find those characteristics that you want. That’s a general rule I’ve learned.
There are a number of characteristics you want in a new hire, but a big part of it is about finding someone who shows some leadership characteristics. In a group exercise, you’d be looking for someone who would actually present their ideas to the group and help implement whatever idea they would decide to go with. Someone who would listen carefully to the opening presentation and be able to respond.
We also look at everyone that we’ve brought in for interviews. We have people observing them and we’ll take the feedback of everyone involved in the recruiting process as to whether these people will fit into our group. They need to be outgoing, they need to have positive attitudes, they need to work well in a group setting, and they need to be good listeners.
For me, those are important traits because I do value my partners’ input. I try to reserve judgment until I have their input, but I also try to take into consideration the impact of all decisions on our people. That’s sort of overlaying everything we do and the impact on our managers and all our staff.
