Fast Lane
Finding flexibility
How to determine if a potential employee fits your needs
By Carolyn LaWell
Smart Business Akron/Canton | February 2010
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Forest Bookman, president and CEO, Forest Corp.
The Forest Corp. knows a little bit about adaptability.
Since the company’s inception 60 years ago, it has evolved from a lamp manufacturer to a leading producer of point-of-purchasing advertising materials.
The ability to add flexibility within your company all starts with your employee base, says Forest Bookman, president and CEO of the family-run business.
“The key to doing that is finding flexible people that have the right attitude and understand the importance of a positive culture in an organization,” says Bookman, who has 100 employees.
Smart Business spoke with Bookman about how to find the right people to fit your culture.
Q. How do you find people to meet your culture?
My recruiting process is I like to get many opinions of, certainly, my management and leadership team, and then, when necessary, I like to get opinions of potential front-line supervisors that may be supporting these people.
Everyone is asking probably the basic boilerplate questions, but then they are tailoring it to their specific interview style or their philosophy. But I would say the core value of the company mission and culture is covered universally.
Then (we do) kind of a debriefing or collaboration of what we hear and what we see in those individuals. But, in the end, there needs to be one decision-maker whether that be myself or whether that be the specific manager that that individual would be reporting to.
I don’t want to call it a consensus, but it is a sharing of a group opinion to arrive upon a decision. I feel that that uncovers a lot of differences and dynamics within each candidate.
Q. How do you determine in an interview whether a prospective employee will fit your company culture?
Trying to expose company culture in an interview is pretty difficult, but the one specific question I like to not only ask about but continue to probe is the individual’s strengths and weaknesses and supporting evidence of those strengths and weaknesses.
It’s always interesting to me when we’re all able to list our strengths, it’s our weaknesses that you’re able to uncover a lot of dynamics within an individual. Weaknesses are very important to all of us because we all have them, and we all need to make sure that our staff and our peers are complementary to those weaknesses, as well as strengths are complementary to others’ weaknesses. I think that’s where culture really starts to engage is having a diverse staff that is complementary to each other.
It starts with, ‘Can you tell me what your strengths and weaknesses are?’[and] depending upon the response, the questions are altered ever so slightly.
