Match: A Systematic, Sane Process for Hiring the Right Person Every Time

Chapter 16. Perform Onboarding: Step 12

The most valuable asset of a 21st century institution will be its knowledge workers and their productivity.

—Peter Drucker

Employees should be treated as you would treat volunteers. If you've ever been in charge of rounding up a group of people to do a project in their free time, you know what I mean. You treat your volunteers like gold. You express your gratitude when they join your team. You do everything you can to help them succeed. You check in on them as they're working. And you thank them sincerely when they're done.

Interesting how the interaction changes when a paycheck is inserted. You don't have volunteers. You have employees, and employees have job descriptions, and they have reviews. If they don't perform up to snuff, they can be terminated.

Note

Sticky Notes:

• Treat employees as volunteers.

• Note gaps in skills and develop a training plan to address them.

• Long term, consider who will mentor the candidate.

That mentality worked marginally well back in the assembly line era. Let's face it, as long as the quota of nuts got screwed onto bolts, it didn't really matter how the worker felt about his or her job.

However, today we live in an economy where ideas rule. Paychecks don't buy ideas. Paychecks buy bodies and a minimal set of tasks. The best parts of people—their creativity, their caring, their personal commitment to the success of your company—those are volunteered by happy and engaged workers.

Your new employee is about to arrive. Will ...