The right stuff

Ask the important questions. A guy came here because he heard about Z-Line, and he wanted to come chat with me about a job. He came to see me, and we talked for a while. We talked about who he sells, what kind of products does he have, who are they made by — he’s giving me a long list of what he can do for the company. My answer is, ‘OK, what can you do for the company starting tomorrow? Show me what you can do right now.’ We hired him in 24 hours.

Once you can convince me that tomorrow I can start going here and here and here and here, and I can make this work, and you’ve proven that to myself and a couple of different people — we bring in other people into the interview — I say, ‘You know what, I think this guy is really, really good.’

You’re always asking, ‘What can you do for me tomorrow?’ That’s the biggest question of all. It’s really about I’m sitting here, you’re sitting here, tell me what you’re going to be able to do that will make a difference to my business. That’s the big thing right there — how are you going to dial my business up?

Involve employees in finding candidates’ experiences. First of all, you want to know who are you hiring. Say, ‘What is this person being hired for? What are we looking for?’ So you’re trying to find out the experience they have — how long have they designed, or how long have (they) been in sales.

It’s basically, ‘What’s your background?’ Not collegewise because college is so-so, it doesn’t really formulate into a corporation automatically. You go to college, and you graduate, and that’s wonderful, but the fact is that when you come in here and you’re trying to get the job, you want to look at this person and see what they’ve done outside of just college. You want to see some experience they’ve got.

(We) will have two other people besides myself that will interview these people so that, again, it all goes back to the same story — hire great people. Let them interview also because I’m not going to be able to think of everything, but let these other two people do the same thing. Then we get together again and say, ‘OK, we asked this question or this question or this question,’ so it comes back to that networking inside my company again to say what do you think about this person and then we start to put the answers together.

How to reach: Z-Line Designs Inc., (925) 743-4000 or www.z-linedesigns.com