Reporter Marcia Pledger of The Cleveland Plain Dealer has been collecting and publishing great small-business mistake stories for several years. Beverly Harris, CEO of Heights Title Agency, discusses some lessons she learned when hiring new employees:
When you work in the title industry, you have to know the law and have high standards. My biggest mistake has been hiring people throughout the years who I believed were qualified based on their number of years in the industry.
I've worked in the title industry for 32 years and run my own business for nearly half of that time. For a long time, I wouldn't hire anyone who had less than 10 years of experience. Unfortunately, I have hired experienced people who sold themselves well in interviews, but their performance told a different story.
For instance, one person I hired with close to 20 years of experience actually closed a deal without collecting money from a client. You can't close any transaction without funds. I've hired experienced people who didn't know the laws that are critical to our industry. Either they didn't understand or they didn't care about the effect on a client. Bad fits have ranged from an attorney who required way too much handholding to someone who performed well but continually had personal issues that affected the company.
The biggest surprise and lesson has been that I've hired a couple of people with far less experience who were so highly qualified that they started their own businesses....
Now any new hire starts out on probation.
When you have a 30- to 60-day probation period, it puts both myself and a prospective new hire on probation. That way they get to see what kind of boss I am and what kind of culture we have, and I get to see how they perform.
Read the rest of the story at the Plain Dealer site here.
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