The Golden Triangle of Hiring

By Brian Tracy

There are three key elements to consider when hiring someone for your company—results, skills, and personality. You might call this the “Golden Triangle” of hiring. Most of your problems with staff will come from a shortfall in one of these three areas.

Results
You first make a list of every result that you want the new person to produce. Always focus on results rather than activities. Take 100 points and allocate them over your list of desired results, divided on the basis of value. This allocation will help you decide the most important results required. By the 80/20 rule, if you have a list of ten desired results for a job, two of those tasks will be worth 80 points and other eights tasks will be worth only 20 points.

Skills
Once you have determined exactly what you want the person to do and the results he or she is expected to produce, the second consideration in hiring is skills. You look for someone with a proven track record in that area. You are seeking a candidate who has already successfully demonstrated the skills necessary to achieve the results you are hiring him or her to achieve for your company. You always hire people based on their past performance and proven results, rather than your future hopes and ambitions or theirs. Many business owners make the mistake of hiring a completely inexperienced person for an important job. They hire based on what the person thinks that he or she can do in the future, rather than what he or she has already done in the past. Occasionally this approach will be successful, but in most cases it will either fail or be a great disappointment.

Personality
The third element to look for is personality. In studies of many thousands of job failures, it has been found that the cause of most of them was “wrong fit.” This means that the person does not have the correct personality to fit in with you and with the other people who work on your team. One of the basic rules of human nature is that people don’t change. Over time they become even more of what they already are. They don’t change their basic personalities, temperaments, or work habits. You should never hire a person with a personality problem with the hope or fantasy that the person is going to change once her or she starts working in your company. It simply won’t happen. I had a woman working for me some time ago who did her job extremely well. She was in charge of mailing, shipping, and delivery and was quite competent. She had only one problem. She was short-tempered and irritable and she used foul language and would snap at other members of the staff for the slightest reason. My role and goal in my business is to achieve and maintain harmony among my people. You can ensure a high level of fit with a new hire by having the person meet with at least three other people before you make a decision.

Action Exercise
If you are interested in a potential candidate to hire for your company pick out three other qualified people to interview that person as well, just to make sure that they act the same way around others as they do around you.

Brian Tracy is the best selling author of more than 42 books, published in 4 countries and translated into dozens of languages. Brian is a world renowned speaker and seminar leader, addressing more than 250,000 people each year throughout the U.S., Canada and in 40 other countries.

About the Author
Brian is Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, and President of Brian Tracy University, a private on-line University for Sales and Entrepreneurship. He can be reached at www.briantracy.com, www.briantracyu.com or 858.481.2977.