Team Building Begins at the Interview

What if every single one of your employees had a stake in seeing his or her co-workers perform well? How would that level of teamwork help build your business? Savvy small business owners know that their two most valuable resources are their staff and their customers. Without one, you can’t have the other. But there’s more to building a staff than just hiring talented, hardworking employees. Those employees need to effectively work together as a team, so that a business owner can delegate with confidence.

“Team building” has been a buzzword in corporate America for quite some time. A lot of money is spent on elaborate training and team-building exercises. If you’re a small to medium-size company, you may know the value of team building and even have the need and desire to do it, but are these training exercises in your budget? What other options do you have?

I have structured our hiring and management practices to achieve team building from the very start and integrate it as part of our daily operations. This is far more cost-effective than waiting until your staffers aren’t effectively working together and trying to fix that problem. That leads to lost business and profitability, problems with holding on to valuable employees and increased costs in training and retraining.

One big decision I made was to let my eight-person staff take the lead in making hiring decisions. I realize that while I’m a good judge of character, the staff is usually the first to know when we need to hire. After all, these are the frontline troops. They are in contact with the customers and the operation every day in ways we owners may not be. They are also the first to know whether or not they want to work with an individual.

To start off the hiring process at our company, my staff and I put our heads together and come up with a fun job description. We’d like people’s desire to come to work to be at least as great as their need for the job. Once the résumés start coming in, the staff reviews and sorts them into three piles, “yes,” “no” and “maybe.” As the manager/owner I get involved at this point only briefly. I quickly review all three piles and sometimes ask questions such as “What did you see in this candidate that I am not seeing?” or “This candidate looks like she fits all the criteria, why is she in the ‘no’ pile?” I’ve been amazed at the useful insights my staff has, what they pick up on, and how they interpret things.

Next is the round of interviews. The manager starts scheduling the sessions around staff availability. We take the “yes” and “maybe” piles and a couple of the “nos” that we hope will prove us wrong and we begin inviting candidates to select interview times.