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52 • The 100 Greatest Ideas for Building the Business of Your Dreams

There are three key elements to hiring someone. Do you trust them? Can you and
your team work with them? Are they competent or better than competent at the job?
Most experienced businesspeople would put the questions in that order of signifi-
cance. The role of the head-hunter can now be seen to be operating on the least
important of these three questions. They should be reliable on whether candidates
have the skills and experience to do the proposed job, but have less knowledge of
whether the new business can trust them or work with them.

To be sure you can trust someone really needs good previous knowledge of him
or her. Hire from people you knew in your last company or from your customers
and suppliers. Hire from any source if you know the person you are going to hire, if
you trust him or her and if you are convinced you can work with them, probably
because you have worked with them in the past.

Second best to this is to hire people who are known to those you already trust
and work with - that is your existing staff. If you do not use head-hunters you can
afford to be very generous in offering incentives for your staff to introduce new
people from their acquaintances and colleagues. Do this and lo and behold you have
grown your own head-hunters.

Idea 34 - Hire the people who fit your dream

Leadership is the skill of persuading people to co-operate willingly to achieve re-
sults. Managing people is a mixture of motivation and manipulation. So far so good.
Unfortunately there is often a correlation between people who are talented and well
able to help you take your business forward, and people who are difficult to control.
After all, by definition you would not work for them; so don't expect them to take
working for you as necessarily their end game. But if you need such people take
them on but keep in mind the need to stay in control.

Be careful of the syndrome where you hire a number two and they bring in from
their previous employment number three, and then number four, and so on. You