The worst time to hire people is when you need them.  Here’s what we mean.

We find the most dangerous times for a client is when they are about to go on a hiring spree.  It does not matter what type of person a company needs – engineers, project managers, sales and account managers, IT – it matters the type of person a company is willing to hire.

We want to share our deep belief, born out by data, of what our hiring strategy should be whenever a company makes a hire.  This approach will generate the strongest growth and success over time.  The approach is hardest to manage during times of strong growth, which is also when the it is most important to follow the approach.  It is hardest to manage during times of growth because it is during these times companies cannot be patient in hiring; they commonly believe they must take what they can get and throw bodies to the work.

We advise clients to always look for only the best people for all of the positions they are about to hire for even if that means everyone must work harder in the short term until we find the absolute right person to join our company and culture.  The approach is critical to any long term prospects of going from “good to great,” to borrow from Jim Collins, who has written and worked on issues of building greatness his whole career. To be proactive, our core philosophy is every hire must be a superstar.

Superstars are the rare segment of the population who have the ability to excel at every turn.  They excelled both academically and in their extra-curriculars — it does not matter at what extra-curricular — at every step in life from high-school through college and into the job market.  They are life-long learners who possess a powerful mix of brains, emotional intelligence, curiosity, and rapid assimilation of new skills.   Their work experiences and history is exemplary.  They are rarely looking for work — they must be found.

Frankly, these are the people who are better than we are (and we can’t be threatened by this fact).  A true superstar picks up new things so fast, we don’t have to spend too much time analyzing whether or not they have the direct skills for the specific job we are hiring them for.  Yes, in an ideal world when you hire a new sales guy for example, it’s great if they have sales experience.  But give a top manager a woman who graduated top of her class at every level, played sports, plays in a band, writes for newspapers or books, won a Rhodes scholarship, or climbed Denali (all just examples), and we guarantee she can learn how to sell.  Obviously, there are limits to what we are saying (you can’t take a great person and turn her into a surgeon without sending her to med school).  The thesis holds, however; if you hire a brilliant mind to open the mail at your office you will have a potential CEO within your ranks for that time in twenty years when you want to retire.

Here is the good news.  You can spot a brilliant person a mile away.  They simply have an aura, which you can learn to identify.  The hard part is being patient and thoughtful in hiring to find and capture those who have the smarts, fortitude and values to not only join your team but to thrive on your team.  By taking the time to find top talent a company will be more valuable, more successful and more fun to work with.

There are volumes of research to support this approach but if you want just one quick thing to read, we suggest Chapter 2 of Good to Great by Jim Collins.  Companies that recruit in this manner simply outperform, by a wide margin, companies aiming only to find people to fill slots on the org chart.

We are interested in your views of this position.  Obviously, many excellent people cannot be screened based solely on credentials.  How did you find the best performers without  simply being knee-jerk elitist in recruiting and screening?  How do you make superstars of people with the capacity but who had not been stretched (and then thrived when you gave them the chance)?  How did you capture the best to join your culture and company?