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but after I've talked to four others I don't remember why he was that good. If instead I evaluate each candidate on the same set of criteria, with the same set of questions, then I can at some point figure out that Candidate A is a great influencer but not good on orga- nizational stuff, while Candidate B is excel- lent at time management but may be weak on influencing, etc. What I have is objective information I can use to determine the best person to hire. And if someone is leaving a company, and they're a top performer, I want to know why. Top performers don't leave when they're hap- py. Sometimes that can be an opportunity for the company that's hiring, and sometimes — for instance if you don't find out why they want to leave — it can turn into disaster. GET GOOD AT HIRING Hiring takes time, energy, diligence and eval- uation. It can be a task or a process. View it as a task, and it can seem simply tedious. I'm not saying you have to love hiring, but if you master the hiring process, you're already way ahead of most competitors, who will view it as a business interruption. Contractors immersed in the day-to-day usually have difficulty expanding. It's tough to set aside time to put together a plan and develop the discipline to stick to it. If you commit to a process of finding the right peo- ple, you'll have most of what you need to expand. Because in a business, people are everything. n if a hire is made, it's made on the basis of how well the applicant related to you, rather than on whether or not they can do the job. LUCK OF THE DRAW We learned at Maggio Roofing, in the hir- ing process, you first of all have to come up with a set of questions. Once you have your questions, you refer to them consistently. For instance, if we're interviewing someone for sales, we ask about that person's influencing style, goal setting methods and time man- agement skills. We want to find out if the candidate is task-oriented. We want a clear sense of how organizationally savvy — that is, able to move past or around internal bar- riers — the candidate is. By asking these questions, we get factual answers that enable us to make comparisons. If I'm the one conducting the interview, I ask the questions, then sit quietly and wait for answers. Rote answers — those too read- ily given — arouse suspicion. If, when I ask a question, I see the candidate look around or away, that means he or she is searching for a fact or anecdote to answer the question. Say, for instance, I ask a candidate for a sales position to describe a goal he or she set, including milestones and a deadline. If that's not part of how the person thinks, or isn't something he or she has done, I may be talking to the wrong candidate. WRITE IT DOWN In addition, we make notes. Typically, there are multiple candidates for any job. So if you don't write down the answers they give, it will be difficult at some point to figure out why one is any better than the other. The guy I talk to today, for instance, is really good, IF YOU'RE like many company owners, hiring is not your favorite thing to do. There's a reason for that, which is that most owners don't do it very often so they don't typically do it very well. For one thing, they don't start the hir- ing process until someone actually leaves. Then, while they're neck deep trying to do that person's job or find someone else in the company who can, they scramble to get an ad out. Next, their inbox is full of résumés, and now that owner needs to speak with eight or 10 people in three days. The result is often that there's no time to give any of those résumés more than a glance before meeting the applicants. FREE FORM INTERVIEW What happens next in this scenario is that owners go into the interview with no set list of questions. Essentially, they wing it. They think that because they're intuitive and know people all they really need to do is talk to the candidate. Once they do, they'll immediately get a sense of whether or not that person will fit. The problem with that kind of free form hiring is the owner never really finds out what he needs to know, which is what the applicant's competencies are. How, for ex- ample, are you able to determine if some- one who's applied for a sales position can actually manage daily appointments and close business? In addition, owners often don't make notes. How could they? The answer to a question such as "What did you do at such- and-such?" can be about whatever the can- didate wants it to be about. These kinds of conversations usually produce a general im- pression of a candidate's social skills, and How to Hire the Best When recruiting becomes not a chore but a process, what happens is that you find the right people to help you grow. By Scott Siegal Scott Siegal is owner of Maggio Roofing in Washington, D.C., and also owns the Certified Contractors Network. You can learn more about CCN by going to the website contractors.net. QualifiedRemodeler.com QR October 2016 | SPECIAL SECTION: HOME IMPROVEMENT PRO 43