Page 67 - Anne Bruce - Building A HIgh Morale Workplace (2002)

Keeping the People Who Keep Your Business in Business 47

Hire with Chutzpah!
A manager’s hiring mistakes are tomorrow’s turnovers.
More than 20% of employees are poor or lower than aver-
age performers; bad hiring decisions are the reason. Bad hiring deci-
sions are also the reason that only 50% of new employees last six
months on the job.Too many managers are not taking enough respon-
sibility for hiring.Too many managers are hiring the “best of the
worst” just because they think good people are in short supply. It’s
time for managers to put some chutzpah back into hiring.

If the right people aren’t hired, you as the manager

are responsible for dealing
with the headaches. That Chutzpah The Yiddish
word for supreme self-con-
means that right here, right
fidence, nerve, audacity, guts.
now, you have to claim pri-
Chutzpah is the perfect term and atti-
mary responsibility for the
tude for managers to adopt when it
hiring decisions—not the comes to taking back the interviewing
team and not HR. and hiring process.

Attitude—What You See Is What You’ll Get

So what can managers do to control today’s hiring mistakes

that quickly become tomorrow’s turnover casualties? Well, for
starters you can read Hiring Great People by Kevin C. Klinvex,
Matthew S. O’Connell, and Christopher P. Klinvex (McGraw-Hill,
1999). But there’s a rule of thumb that you can put into prac-
tice immediately. It’s a standard by which the best-of-the-best

organizations hire their people, organizations that report the
lowest turnovers rate in their respective industries. The rule: hire
for attitude and train for skill. The reason: what people know is
often far less important than what they are.

So which organizations are hiring for attitude? Nordstrom,
Whole Foods Market, Nucor Corporation, Rosenbluth
International, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few. All of
these organizations subscribe to the belief that people with the
right attitude can always be trained in matters they need to
learn. However, a bad attitude is something you cannot easily