Aug 28, 2017
How do you make a great hire?
Spalding: The first thing we do is we look at our best
people in each of our areas, right. So, our best technologists,
what are the characteristics that make them really good? Who are
our best sales people? What are the characteristics that make them
really good? Right. And there might be some obvious things like,
hey, they're very responsive to the customer, they present well,
right, there's an experience there, there's a knowledge, they think
strategically long-term. But, we try to capture those in a profile,
and then we benchmark that against any candidate coming in.
And we do that through a few ways, we do that through some testing
that we do around different profiles, and so forth to match it up,
kind of customize testing against our profiles. We also do that
during the interview process. So, we tend to have, we get accused
of hiring slow sometimes because we really believe that we want to
have a variety of different people interview the candidate. And
then, frankly, we want the candidate to get a really good sense of
what is Peak 10 all about. What is our DNA? What makes us tick?
Because no one wants to have that meeting six months down the road
and say, "Hey, you're really not a good fit here." or, "Gee, this
isn't the right company to be at."
So, we try to minimize all of that by sharing as much as we can
right up front. How we operate, how we think about our customers,
how we do things internally, what we expect, etc. It's a little bit
of a longer process than perhaps most, but at the end of the day we
have to bring in the highest quality talent we possibly can to, you
know, to match what we're doing for our customers, and that's being
an extension of their business.
So, those are some of the things we do. And tactically where we
serve in markets, we're very community-oriented, we build
relationships with the local technology schools. So, we're able to
do some internships, and we're able to get some early views on
potential, strong candidates, and they get a little more experience
in the technology and service provider world and see if there's a
match. So, we're doing some of that as we continue to get larger
and be more innovative around that.