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A Success Hiring Process Includes Eliminating Stepping Stones & Includes A List Of Things Done

Simon Reilly

Jason Friend, CEO of 37 Signals has an excellent article in the May Issue of Inc. Magazine entitled When To Hire An Assistant.

Jason’s article includes two key points that are include in The Leading Advisor Hiring Process.

  1. “We interviewed some really good people. The problem: Most of the best candidates saw the job as a steppingstone. They wanted to start out as an assistant and end up somewhere else. That’s completely fair, of course, but it didn’t do us much good. We needed an assistant who wanted to be an assistant—someone who actually enjoyed sweating the details at a small but growing company, someone who would excel and grow but not grow out of the job itself.”
  2. “So we set out to find an assistant: someone to assist me, David, and anyone else at the company who needed help with administrative tasks. Since we’d never hired for this kind of position, I went online and reviewed a bunch of assistant and office manager job postings. But the listings didn’t really do much for me. This is a problem with job listings in general: They don’t seem to describe an actual day’s work. They’re heavy on skills but not actions. We decided to go in a different direction to locate our new assistant. Instead of a boring list of skills—this software, that many years of experience, “team player,” etc.—we wrote a list of 26 things that this person would have done in a week had he or she been working here.”

I can’t agree more with Jason Friend’s comments having run into countless financial advisors that have attracted a Hiring Fatal Attraction.

They attracted a Hiring Fatal Attraction because they did not have a clear hiring plan and they wasted too much time explaining the merits of their company and the qualifications that were required versus the things that the new hire was to do in a week.

Many financial advisors get fooled by potential new administrative and marketing assistants that are using the financial advisor as a stepping stone to become a financial advisor at the financial advisor’s expense, with the new hire taking the financial advisor’s clients out the back door when they leave.

When the things that the new hire is to do in a week are not clear it means that there is an absence of a job description and it is sad to say that the new hire will wind up doing their version of the job description, not the financial advisors.

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