Part 6: Building Our Team - Hire by Hire

 

Part 6

Building Our Team - Hire by Hire

By Chuck Baren, COO of HirexHire

HirexHire is Building a Great Company for Great People.

Parts 1-5 of this 6-Part blog series outline how we ensure the great people we hire get the experience they deserve from HirexHire. Go back and read Parts 1-5 here. In Part 6, we discuss what we look for when hiring great people.

 
 

HirexHire Team Outing @ the Chicago White Sox game

HirexHire is a small company with big aspirations for growth. As a small company, we know that every hire will have an outsized impact on our success. So we take hiring very seriously and do not rush the process. We know how to identify who we want to hire, and we take our time to ensure we make the right hiring decisions.

Our Hiring Criteria

At HirexHire, we believe that an employee’s workplace attitude is the biggest predictor of on-the-job success. We know this by simply drawing from our own experiences.  

We reflected upon the top performers from our past and identified the attitudes and behaviors that helped them succeed.  These folks took their work very seriously; they enjoy the work; they were always open to other perspectives and ideas that would improve results; they worked with urgency; etc.  We also reflected on the poor performers and noted that they shared characteristics that negatively impacted their work … attitudes and behaviors we should avoid when hiring.

So what attitudes do we look for at this stage in our company’s life cycle?

  • We hire people who take pride in their work while working with urgency. In a small business like ours, every element of service has a measurable impact on our customers’ satisfaction.  Quality and timeliness are rightfully expected, and our people need to be intrinsically driven to meet these expectations.

  • We hire people who are comfortable in an ever-changing environment. As we grow, we continue to build out our methods, tools, systems, etc., and we need our employees to be able to embrace the changes. As we evolve, our team is encouraged to explore how they can make our company better and help us all deliver better results for our clients.  

  • We hire people who exhibit good business judgment. Great employees can strike the balance between being relaxed and fun yet professional; striving for perfection yet knowing when more time and effort will no longer improve the results; sending emails and making phone calls; resisting and relenting; etc.

There are other attitudes and behaviors that help our employees succeed, but all of our great employees share these foundational traits. 

Evaluating Candidates

We’ve been able to hire great people who thrive here because we know what kind of people will succeed in our environment, and we know how to evaluate their candidacy - a perk of being a hiring and recruiting consultancy!

Naturally, we screen candidates for skills, knowledge, and experience. That is fairly straightforward.  Because we believe that candidates’ past behaviors and attitudes are the best predictors of their future behaviors and attitudes, we spend the lion’s share of our evaluation conducting behavioral interviews. 

Evaluating candidates for their soft skills can be somewhat of an art form, but we have had years of experience learning how to interpret answers to behavioral interview questions.

  • We know to ask open-ended questions without leading the candidate to any specific answer.

  • We know how to connect a candidate’s description of their past behaviors with scenarios our employees regularly encounter.

  • We know how to distinguish between what a candidate tells us about their past and what they tell us they could do in the future.

  • We know how to determine if a candidate will thrive with our management philosophies, styles, and routines.

Building a Great Place for Great People

Our new and tenured employees can envision their future at HirexHire because we understand what it takes to build a great place for great people. Our employees know that:

  1. We believe in the importance of building a great place for our employees. 

  2. We build trusting relationships with our employees.

  3. We focus on skills development and career pathing as we grow.

  4. We reward great work and recognize hard work, and we understand the difference and value of each. 

  5. We have designed our management routines to nurture each individual's personal and professional goals.

  6. We know how to hire the right colleagues as we grow.

We believe in the plan we’ve outlined to build a great place for great people.  Each of these six elements is important and effective, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts when we stay focused and disciplined.

This blog series is a public commitment to our employees to build a great place for great people to work long into their futures. Shout out to our team members who are proof that we are achieving greatness.

 
 

Thank you for reading about how we’re operating internally at HirexHire. We mean everything we’ve written in these articles. Please share the links below to anyone looking for some guidance for their own small business or to those who just find these things interesting.

For more HirexHire reading material, you can follow our 5-Step Framework to Hire the Right Talent, or you can follow our Candidate Tip series for ‘Dos and Don’ts’ to land the job.

 
 

How HirexHire is building a great place for great people - Hire by Hire:

 

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About HirexHire

HirexHire (pronounced: hire by hire) is a Chicago-based recruiting and talent consultancy that integrates with companies short-term to provide long-term talent solutions. 

We take a seat in our client’s everyday operations to understand their people, goals, gaps, and challenges. We then develop and implement the processes and technologies to execute a sustainable and scalable talent plan.

We partner with companies expecting or experiencing high growth, leading them to hire at scale or fill a critical role rapidly. We develop and execute creative strategies to carry out all aspects of the recruiting process: crafting job descriptions, building candidate pipelines, vetting candidates, conducting interviews, negotiating offers, and leading new hires to their first day on our client’s team.

HirexHire was founded in 2018 with an initial investment by founder and CEO Mike Durec. The firm found its first customers through Mike’s network in the Chicagoland startup community. Consistent success has led to a sterling reputation and steady growth. The company has more than doubled its number of customers, revenue, and employee base each year and is showing no signs of slowing down.

About Mike Durec

Founder and CEO

As Founder and CEO of HirexHire, Mike partners with operating executives and investors to develop and implement processes and technologies to successfully attract and retain talent.

In his past work as a corporate recruiting leader in technology, Mike crafted and managed strategies to hire thousands of professionals across many functional areas worldwide. He has led hiring initiatives in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, France, Australia, and India. Mike brings practical leadership experience and a legacy of success to every engagement.

HirexHire now operates with Mike’s proven approach, deploying empathy with candidates and hiring managers and advocating for the best interest of both parties. Mike emphasizes the two-way relationship between the employee and employer, resulting in long-term people placement and greater work-life satisfaction.

About Chuck Baren

Chief Operating Officer

Chuck has more than 20 years of experience working in professional services for SAAS providers, most of which was with Fieldglass, where he helped it grow from 20 employees and no revenue in 2000 through its $1 billion acquisition by SAP in 2014. He regularly received high marks for the level of employee engagement of his teams for which he prioritized people management and the need to attract and retain top talent by building a great place for them to work. By the time he left SAP Fieldglass, the professional services team he led had grown to approximately 200 employees.

Chuck wrote about his experience leading his growing team at Fieldglass through challenging periods of rapid growth in Money Matters, Top Tips for Success, the Business Leaders Edition, volume 3. His chapter entitled “People Management is Key to Survival in a High Growth Environment” helped propel the book to Amazon Best Seller status in its first days of release.

 
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