Roxi Bahar Hewertson - Hire Right, Fire Right: A Leaders Guide to Finding and Keeping Your Best People

Leadership expert Roxi Bahar Hewertson brings more than three decades of practical experience from the worlds of higher education, business, and nonprofits. She is an organizational consultant, executive leadership coach, motivational speaker, and author of the acclaimed book Lead Like It Matters... Because It Does . She taught at Cornell Universitys School of Industrial and Labor Relations where she received her masters degree. Roxi has coached more than a hundred senior leaders and taught her award-winning leadership courses to thousands more.

Roxi has spent her entire career being a leader and has helped both emerging and expert leaders boost quantifiable job performance to achieve or exceed personal and organizational goals. As a certified Presence-Based and International Coaching Federation coach, she invites leaders to create their best lives and share the powerful journey that one-on-one executive leadership coaching can offer.

At the core of Roxis passion is her desire to inspire and empower leaders on their journey of: honing interpersonal effectiveness, increasing emotional intelligence, and sharpening their capacity to create great results with their teams. Roxi offers her practical, commonsense, and proven solutions to complex leadership and organizational problems, making her advice and counsel in high demand.

Roxi is the CEO of Highland Consulting Group Inc. based in Brevard, North Carolina.

Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
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6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom

Copyright 2020 by Roxi Bahar Hewertson

All rights reserved . No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bahar Hewertson, Roxi, author.

Title: Hire right, fire right : a leaders guide to finding and keeping your best people / Roxi Bahar Hewertson.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020008596 (print) | LCCN 2020008597 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538130629 (hardcover ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781538130636 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Employee selection. | Employee retention.

Classification: LCC HF5549.5.S38 B347 2020 (print) | LCC HF5549.5.S38 (ebook) | DDC 658.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008596

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020008597

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Figure 1.1. Hiring Right Search Map: Call to Action

The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.

Steve Jobs

Were going to kick off our hiring journey at step 1 on the Hiring Right Search Map presented in . This call to action is intended to inspire you to keep going, even if the going gets a little slippery, you trip here and there, or a new path has to be forged from scratch. I have no doubt that you have some kind of hiring process in place already; the question is this: Is it working for you? My guess is you picked up this book because somethings not working as well as you need it to, and youd like to improve your results. To understand the why a bit more clearly, lets begin by looking into your organizations wallet .

As hard as it may be to believe, the hard data show us over and over again that the cost of a bad hire can be more than two times (2x) the persons annual salary... until you fire them or they leave. How much you lose depends on how much time, money, and productivity is flushed away in the meantime. Add the loss of morale among the team members before and/or after the person leaves. Then... add another two (2x) or three times (3x) or more of their salary to replace them. In Geoff Smart and Randy Streets book, WHO: The A Method for Hiring , their client research resulted in estimating that the average hiring mistake costs fifteen times an employees base salary in hard costs and productivity loss. While theirs is mainly a single industry- and role-specific calculation, it still makes the point, right? This hiring business is costly and important!

And yet... we hire most people and positions the way weve always done it and based on resumes with thus and such degree and/or technical skills along with perceived or tested IQ. We now know that EQ (Emotional Quotient), or Emotional Intelligence (EI) as it is also known, is far more important for success in most jobs, and its critical for success within leadership roles. We continue to hire and promote people, particularly leaders, by relying heavily on IQ and technical skill sets that they present on that all-important resume.

Have you heard anything like this in your workplace? Shes the best salesperson so shell surely be the best leader of other salespeople. Or how about this: I know hes a bit of a bully, but hes uber smart, so hell do fine. We might as well say a brilliant scientist, who is deathly afraid of heights, should go up to the moon, or a known con man will make a great CEO because he says he knows how to negotiate.

Assumptions as ridiculous as these happen every day and everywhere. Too often hiring managers operate on wrong, and even dangerous, assumptions about the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are truly needed for a particular position. We keep getting the same lousy results, and yet we have not substantively evolved and adopted best hiring practices in many, if not most, organizations.

I agree with Albert Einstein, We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

Success in hiring well is defined this way: The newly hired person has been on board for at least eighteen months, is productive, and is doing exactly what he or she was hired to do, resulting in a satisfied, engaged employee and positive business outcomes.

A successful hire means far more than avoiding failure. We can hide failure by allowing mediocre new hires to remain in place for far too long. A successful hire is what we need to work toward; an 8590 percent, or more, hiring success rate should be expected.

The question is, are you prepared to invest in finding and wooing the cream of the crop for your team, or will you settle for good enough for now? Your answer to that question will determine your hiring success rate. And remember, it does not matter what business you are in. You could be the owner of a pizza franchise, the executive director of a local food bank, a superintendent of schools, a presidential candidate, a house cleaning service provider, COO of a trucking company, a bank manager... if you hire and fire people in your workplace, Im talking to you.

Id like to help you experience the task of hiring someone as positive and a lot more fun than you may have thought possible. Hiring right is an excellent opportunity to grow your organization in a mindful and productive way. Youll be amazed at the how much time and energy you can access when you arent spending a huge chunk of your work life cleaning up personnel messes. And if that werent enough incentive, it is so much more work and expense to get hiring wrong than to get hiring right .