Hiring To Be Liked Is Sabotaging Your Business

Bill is unconscious to his inherent need to be liked. His inherent need to be liked is dominating his hiring decisions.

Bill considers himself to be a people person and an excellent salesperson, and a ‘make it happen’ kind of guy.

Bill’s problem is that he has more clients than he can handle in his financial advisor practice, and is in desperate need of a new assistant. His current assistant just blew up and walked out the door leaving him stranded.

Bill fears and just hates the hiring process because the process seems so hit and miss.

His past strategy includes asking his friends and business associates if they know of anyone that might be a good fit. He is reluctant to use a formal approach that includes writing a job description, placing an ad, conducting interviews, evaluating assessments and completing reference checks.

One way or another Bill finds a candidate and he makes his decision based on how likeable he finds the person, how talkative they are, what they look like, their people skills and how hungry they are for the job. Sure their resume is worth taking a look at, but how well they get along with him is the thing that counts.

The past stories of the highway wrecks of his failed attempts to keep an assistant seem to play over and over again.

Everything seems to start out all right.

Their days start out with getting together to talk about a combination of training and a review of the priorities for the day.

The day continued with much interaction during the day with his ever changing priorities.

Bill really enjoys the company of having an assistant to bounce ideas to. Ideas about both his business and his personal life, as he believes his life is an open book.

The assistants seemed to enjoy the details of the cases that he is working on, and they don’t seem to mind staying late or even work on the weekends.

Bill didn’t mind paying the odd bonus or extra reward inviting the assistant to client functions as the assistants would often do personal errands for Bill that included picking up his dry-cleaning and picking his kids up from the “X”.

Then the relationships seemed to sour.

It usually started off with the assistants starting to show up later and later for work. This lead to taking longer and longer lunch breaks. Then the personal calls started, and the calls seemed to take longer and longer. All of this seemed to contribute to the assistant forgetting important details no matter how many times they were told.

All of this contributed to Bill getting angrier and angrier which lead to the blow up that lead to the last assistant walking out.

Bill could hear his own words ringing in his own hears as he pictured the assistant walking out the door, “it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell you, you just keep forgetting!”