When Clinton Howard
founded RBC Life
Sciences Inc. in 1991,he was the entire company
and did everything himself.
Today, as chairman and CEO
of the $27 million nutritional
supplement and wellness company, he knows that to move
forward in business, you have
to hire with the skills to get
you there.
“I can’t come to work in the
morning and open the door
and do all the work,” he says.
“I can’t be very productive,
and if we want to grow, we
have to have people who I can
delegate the jobs [to], who
have skills greater than mine
in specific areas.”
Smart Business spoke with
Howard about how Henry
Ford’s words on hiring guide
him today and why conducting
multiple interviews with a
potential employee is critical.
Q. How do you identify which
qualities you’re looking for in
potential employees?
You bring in people who
have skills. Henry Ford said
it’s easy to run a big company
— all you have to do is hire
people who are smarter than
you are in each area and get
out of the way. If you’re going
to grow, you got to have good
people. It’s very important.
Honesty has always been
No. 1. A person has to have
good moral fiber to be able
to work with them year after
year. You look for honesty,
and you look for people who
have a positive attitude
toward their work and a positive attitude toward their
relations with their fellow
employees.
Q. How do you gauge these
characteristics during an
interview?
You can’t just by a conversation because some people who
aren’t honest are very skilled
at appearing to be very honest.
It’s important to know what
kind of record a person has in
their past employment or
school if they’re coming out of
college or graduate school.
It’s really important to check
their references. A lot of times
people don’t bother to check
references, but that’s
very important because
I’m not a psychologist or
an expert in sitting
across the desk and
evaluating a person in
my interviewing them.
That would be No. 1,
to see how they’ve
worked out in their previous activities.
