Dominic Monkhouse is the UK managing director of web hosting
business PEER 1, where he's recruited more than 20
people since joining. He shares his most effective - and often
unconventional - tricks for finding and keeping great
talent.
Ask interviewees to draw a picture
The first thing I do when I interview people is hand them a
blank piece of paper and a bunch of coloured pencils and ask them
to draw whatever motivates or inspires them. The first part of the
interview is talking about that. I didn't even take cv's into the
15 interviews I did last week. A cv is just an indicator the
person's got the technical abilities to do the job. It doesn't say
anything about them.
I always ask people what they like doing outside work. I'm not
going to hire someone who can only say, "I like to spend time with
my family" - how dull! I don't want dull people to work for me,
because my customer would find them boring too.
Get people inside and outside the company to help
interview
I interview every single person we hire. I owe it to staff and
customers to hire good people. But I get the other staff involved
in interviewing too. Everyone is looking for the same thing, the
same energy. We look for people who are self-motivated and have
passion, who can take the initiative.
You can get another business owner or entrepreneur to interview
alongside you. It really helps because sometimes you're so vested
in wanting to hire someone, you end up just hiring the least worst
person you see. It helps to have someone who doesn't have emotional
interest in the business there to see things objectively. For
example, I've used marketing agency bosses to hire marketing people
before. The candidates don't mind. It might be a bit more
intimidating for them, but I'm not looking for someone who's easily
intimidated.
Ability testing
As well as phone and face-to-face interviews, we use strength
finder tests, so we know the person can do the job and get on with
it. So we'll test for a sense of responsibility, which means they
self-manage. We look for achiever strength, which means they don't
just want to go and lie on the beach. Buy a book called Strengthsfinder 2.0 - it talks you through the
test and what strengths you should look for in each role. You use a
code in the back which gives you access to the test. We buy 15 or
20 at a time, for around £7 each. The cost is worth it.
Offer people £1,000 to quit
Within the first two weeks of joining a company an employee
knows whether they've made a mistake and if the company's not right
for them. But the employer can't tell that. So we offer new
recruits £1,000 to walk away after those first two weeks. If they
don't take it, it means they're happy, so you know it's the right
decision. But it means they're forced to think about it.
If you don't try to have that conversation that early on, the
next break point is after three months, when you've
realised the person isn't right. The cost of finding someone again
is huge. And it might be that the next person isn't right, and the
person after that - in which case it could be nine months before
you find the right person.
The two-week idea saves you the three months trying to work out
if the person's right, and if you have to spend that £1,000, it's
money well spent. It means you can crack on. Although no one's ever
taken the money and left us yet!
Keeping good people: cock of the month
I want to keep my team happy. So I give them free breakfast,
free fruit in the office, we have Beer Fridays (free beer!), a
mini-bar, a dartboard, a Wii. We have free food day the day before
payday, when everyone's skint.
We always talk about the state of our finances, which is
something too many small businesses are nervous about doing. It
should be transparent - it makes the team feel part of creating the
success.
We celebrate our failures as well as our successes. We have a
'cock of the month' award for the biggest mistake made. It's an
actual model of a cock - or a rooster, I should probably say! I've
won it myself before.
The little black book
You go to other people's offices where a chair's broken in the
meeting room because no one thinks it's their job to fix it - it
just creates a bad impression.
So everyone gets a little black book when they start. You write
in it the stuff we should change, things you don't think work in
the company. But I don't have time to fix all those things - so I
tell the team that if it costs less than £100 to fix, and it makes
the business a better place to work, just expense it and do it.
Once every six months we sit down and look at everyone's black
books and share them to fix the bigger problems in the company.
Keep finding ideas
Lots of ideas I get come from other companies I've visited or
work with. Or ones I've spotted in 'best companies to work for'
lists - you just give them a call and ask if you can see how things
are done. You just need to keep bringing in ideas that work for
other businesses.
Find out more about PEER
1