You've been promoted to supervisor or manager.  You've never hired anybody in your life.  And you're instantly expected to do it well and do it NOW.

Hiring is not just a line item on your job description.  You will be judged on how well you do this.  Upper management will be looking at your staff turnover.  Especially the staff you've hired.

It turns out that hiring is a critical activity and your success as a manager depends on how well you can find, interview and select each person who works for you.  All of a sudden hiring becomes not this annoying thing you have to shoehorn into your already hectic life--if you're a savvy manager you will realize that it is as critical as electricity in the emergency room of a hospital. Without it, you're dead meat.

I have never had to fire anybody I've hired.

Part of that has been luck and part of that has been because of the following advice you're going to read now.  I hope you're reading this before you hire anyone so that you too will be able to say:  "I've never had to fire anybody I've hired."  If you already have, then may you be able to say:  "I've never had to fire anybody I've hired since I read Alyce's advice."

Given the fact that roughly 50% of all Americans have sabotaged a job at least once in their lives, how can you, the savvy management person, avoid hiring the sabotaging employee?

1.  Recognize how serious the function of hiring is and devote your attention to it.  Don't leave it up to personnel or any staff person regardless of how busy you are.  If you're a control freak you don't need to be told this.

2.  Understand that employee sabotage comes in four flavors--get your management antennae sensitive to discovering it.  The motivations behind the sabotaging employee can be as varied as:  they're grouchy and they just don't want anybody to succeed, all the way up to they'd secretly like to start their own business and don't even know it themselves--they're waiting to get fired so they'll have an excuse.  As a manager, you don't have time to discover the whys for the sabotage, you just need to find the potential saboteur and eliminate them from your list of candidates.  If you select wrong enough of the time, upper management will be looking to eliminate you.

Employees sabotage:  time, stuff, space and information.  They sabotage the company goals, other people, the strategic plan, the team--yeah, sure but HOW they do it comes out and down to:  time, stuff, space and information.

     Sabotaging Time looks like this:  procrastination, deadlines not met, being late for anything, water cooler gab fests, long lunches, working late too often (this isn't the sign of worker devotion, it's a sign of a worker with a bad time management problem and a potential martyr), wasting everybody's time by running boring and unnecessary meetings, prolonged playing on the computer, not respecting other people's time.

     Sabotaging Stuff looks like this:  misuse of company funds (money is stuff), misfiling, consistent screw ups of audiovisual set ups, damaging equipment, wasting everything from paper to gasoline, "borrowing" some other employee's stuff without permission, losing stuff, "misplacing" stuff, shared tools and equipment left screwed up for the next person (jammed copy machines to D9 Caterpillars).

     Sabotaging Space looks like this:  occupying more area than is necessary, not comprehending that every square foot of space has a dollar value attached to it and then operating accordingly, invading other employee's space with their stuff or their bodies, rendering any space (locker rooms to lunch rooms) less desirable than when they entered, using a space for inappropriate activity.

     Sabotaging Information looks like this:  eliminating key players from a meeting, not returning phone calls, leaving e-mail or phone messages with a "just contact me" message instead of relaying requests, withholding critical information, "forgetting" to inform others so that they can be successful, "accidentally misinforming" others, inaccuracies on resume or job application, hiding information from clients/customers, lying to the press or fellow employees or anybody.

The President of the United States is a federal employee...and every time we've come close to impeaching one of them, it's been because they have sabotaged all four of these elements.  Employee sabotage is not the exclusive realm of entry level positions. 

Mini-Quiz
The City Manager of a good-sized American city made front page news when he was arrested for stealing a $9 pair of sunglasses.  His salary was in the six figures.  That made for interesting news.  What made it fascinating news was this wasn't the first time he'd done it.  The city's law enforcement people had let the first offense go because of the guy's position.

OK, class, this is a true story.  What do you deduce from the City Manager's behavior?

If you said, he's a nut and needs help, you're probably right but leave that for others' speculation.  It's none of our business.  What is our business, especially with government employees is:  this man is sabotaging his job.  His message is:  "I don't want to be City Manager."

So you may ask, why didn't he just resign?  He didn't resign because he didn't know he didn't want to be City Manger (or to use my language, he didn't know there was a person on the inside that didn't want to be City Manager anymore) and even if he did know it, he couldn't admit it (for whatever reason).  And we can suspect, the element of public humiliation was something he actually wanted.  Remember there is the awful phenomenon of human behavior that makes us recreate what we "knew" as children--and if you, like the City Manager, were consistently humiliated then you will come to expect and manage to bring into your life that same humiliation.

"In all our misery, we are comfortable."
--Wally Minto

The City Manger got what he wanted:  (a) relieved of his position and (b) publicly humiliated and (c) treatment and sympathy for his "problem" and (d) no chance of working and staying in that city.

How can you keep the City Manager and people like him off your payroll?

Don't hire them in the first place.

3.  The hiring process begins with the resume and job application.  So put a filter on your awareness when you read these documents and screen for behavioral sabotage.

How many jobs has this person had?

How many successful enterprises have they been a part of?

Do they appear to have an uncanny knack for selecting loser outfits?

Have they selected their employment carefully in the past?

How have they presented themselves on the page?  If you're hiring a payroll accountant, alarm bells should go off in your head when you see an application with handwriting you can't read, misuse of grammar and smeared ink.  What qualities are you looking for in this employee...and are they reflected for you on paper?  Don't ignore the signs.  If you're hiring somebody to install sheet rock, you may not care about misspelled words...maybe.

What high school activities did they participate in?  Achievers get started early.  Knowing their outside activities will also give you a window into the kinds of ambitions this person really has.  If this person was an active member of Future Teachers of America, for instance, are you hiring them for a position where they will sit alone in a room without human contact for days at a time?  Conversely, if this person won blue ribbons with the Future Farmers of America and you're hiring forest rangers, that might be a great big plus.  Do you need an employee who has a devoted respect for deadlines?  Were they on the school newspaper or yearbook staff?  Great!

Successful career counselors take people back to their childhoods in an effort to connect real passion to real jobs.  When people are doing what they want to do, they're usually good at it.  The high school treasurer of the chess club may make an unlikely candidate for the position of glad-handing WelcomeWagon host.

If your candidate spent their high school years under the oil pan of an old street rod and you're hiring bus mechanics, you may have a match there.

As a manager, you need to remember that you cannot be all things to all people.  Your task as Hiring Guru is to fit round pegs into round holes.  Even when square pegs are presenting themselves as round pegs.

4.  The interview:  your butt is on the line, not theirs. Be rested, be prepared and don't do more than 4 interviews in one day.  If this person will be working with both men and women, team interview with an opposite sex partner.

Interviewing Tips for Hiring

     Ask open ended questions.  Questions that can't be answered yes or no.  Past performance is a great indicator of self sabotage.

     Team interview, if possible. Team interviewing allows you to take special note of how much time the candidate looks and responds to you and how much time to your partner.  Do they seem to only want to look at the male in the room?  Are they obviously more comfortable talking to the female?  Do they speak only to the person who is in the "power position"?  Or is it equal and comfortable communication coming from your candidate?

     Most important:  Ask situation questions.

What's that?

     Situation questions are scenarios that you are going to create probably from real life happenings in your office.  There's no "right" and "wrong" to these questions; they are judgment calls about real life.

     For instance, let's say you're hiring a mail room/errand person.  You ask this question:  "You have payroll checks and $30,000 worth of receivables.  You are in the company van headed to the bank.  The van breaks down on the freeway.  The cell phone battery is dead.  What do you do?"

     You're hiring a staff printer and you ask:  "You have 3 jobs all requiring two hours of press time.  It is 2:00 pm and they are all due at 5:00 pm.  What do you do?"

     Receptionist candidate:  "You've got the company president's mother on Line 1, an irate customer on Line 2 and 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace has just phoned in on Line 3.  What do you do?"

     Manager candidate:  "How do you fill positions and select new employees--what's your criteria or what's your system?"

     Ask team questions:  You can even create symbolic questions, such as--on a football team, what position would you want to play?--to get a feel for their comfort level in team situations.  If you don't need a team player, then don't hire for one.  But when will that be?  Until there is a job description for "hermit", we're all somehow connected to a team.

     Follow EEO guidelines.  It's not a straight jacket; it's good business.

     Watch for phrases:  "but what I really want to do is...."
                                    "they wouldn't let me...."
                                    "I couldn't get them to...."
                                    "It wasn't my fault..."
                                    "They had lousy equipment..."
                                    "Sorry I was late..."

     Watch body language:  The problem with body language is that people take an isolated body gesture and conjure up all kinds of conclusions.  "Crossed arms means they're closed"--well, not necessarily, it's a comfortable thing to do.  If, however, you're getting a lot of interesting body language (hand over the mouth constantly may indicate there's more they really want to say, scratching nose is a gesture of an untruth according to recent research, repeated shrugging indicative of not owning responsibility) should cause your self sabotage antennae to twitch.

     Look for any incongruencies.  Has their behavior matched what they are saying?  Do they say "left" and go "right"?  "My goal in life is to help all the children of the world.  I took my college graduation money and went on a cruise to Hawaii." or this:  "I really want to pay off my college loans," and then 40 seconds later, "I bought myself this really great new SUV!"

     Don't fill in the silences.  An American is uncomfortable with 3 seconds of silence in a conversation and extremely uncomfortable with 10 seconds.  Let your candidate fill the silences and frequently they will give you information you need to make a hiring decision.

    Don't ask stupid questions.  What is a stupid question?  My favorite is:  what do you want to be doing in 5 years?  I think the response to this question that I liked the most is (speaking to the interviewer) "I want your job."

     Trust your instincts.  Cops tell us that victims almost always have a creepy sense of apprehension just before a crime happens.  They tell us all to trust that instinct and act on it even if it goes against rational thinking.  The same advice goes for hiring.  Just as the interview is ending, ask yourself this question:  "Is this person going to sabotage their job?"  Then listen hard to your internal decision maker.

I most sincerely hope that you will be able to say:  "I've never had to fire anybody I've hired", because it's expensive, it's painful for everybody, it's a major stressor.  A person being fired experiences a 200% jump in their stress levels...but the person doing the firing experiences a 500% increase in their stress levels.

Hire well.  Sleep well.

copyright (C) 1999   Alyce Cornyn-Selby

Excerpt from:  What's Your Sabotage?: The Last Word in Overcoming Self Sabotage.

Includes: 

The Inner Theatre Method 
Specific Sabotage Solutions for--Finances, Weight, Time, Career,
    Relationships, Teamwork, etc.
Solutions for Dealing with Sabotage by Others
First aid for the Chronically Unmotivated

Available for $15.95 1-800-937-7771.

INFORMATION YOU CAN USE A LIFETIME.

Alyce's programs are used by the F.B.I., New York Times, Boeing, Microsoft, associations and colleges in US, Canada and UK.  Nationally recognized expert on the subject of self sabotage, Alyce has been featured on all networks, AM Northwest, hundreds of radio stations, Reader's Digest and Psychology Today.  With an early background of adversity and obesity, Alyce brings special insight to a subject that is frequently life-threatening...and frustrating.

What do Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton, Fergie and YOU all have in common?*
 

(*Answer:  Self Sabotage)

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