Thursday, March 17, 2011

John Bliss audio story - a couple of hiring mistakes


John Bliss is the founding principal of BlissPR. This story is part of a longer interview from 2010. John states that hiring experienced people was much more risky than "growing your own," and provides two examples.

You can listen to the story here (3:30).

Transcript:

Your biggest mistakes are going to be your hires that don't work out. Because you invest a certain amount of time in .. And then once you've hired them, our philosophy always was, we'd rather wait too long to fire than fire too quickly. And I think that's the right posture. But it also means that when you make mistakes you pay a little bit more for it.

The area of biggest mistakes, and I would bet you could talk to a lot of entrepreneurs in a service business like mine, and they would have had the same experience. Lateral hires - in other words, people that you hire from other companies, instead of growing from your own entry level - lateral hires are an area rife with potential disaster.

And we had a number of potential - um - actual disasters. The thought is you hire somebody with experience and connections and maybe can even bring in a little business. And what we find is invariably almost complete disappointment. This is true for lateral hires from a number of areas.

One, we hired somebody who had experience working in PR departments of 3 or 4 major corporations. And he was a perfectly nice guy. But people that are corporate animals are absolutely unfit for the entrepreneurial environment. They're too political in what they do, because in big corporations there's too much politics. They're more concerned with appearances than with actualities. And we learned that through a couple of painful experiences - we didn't want to hire people from big corporate PR departments.

But we didn't extrapolate from that lesson #2, which is that we shouldn't hire people from big PR firms. Because we hired someone from a big PR firm, and we said, "We're an entrepreneurial organization, Sometimes you're going to have to take orders from people 20 years younger than you. Is that a problem?" "Oh, no, no."

"You're going to share an office. Is that a problem?" "Oh, no, no." So we hired her and of course both of those things were huge problems. She was stuck in the same kind of bureaucratic mindset as people from big corporations.

So, a couple of those hires we paid dearly for. We lost time and momentum because they were in house. The only saving grace is, talking to heads of other PR firms, I think we haven't made more mistakes than anybody else, and actually may have made a few less.

But mistakes they were. And they're painful when they happen.

No comments:

Post a Comment