Hire Great People Fast

Yahoo!, the Internet search firm in Santa Clara, California, is also in the middle of a growth tear. Incorporated in April 1995 by two Stanford University graduate students, Yahoo! went public one year later. Users view an average of 30 million pages per day, up from just 4 million in 1995.

No company can grow this fast without adding gobs of people. At the time of its IPO Yahoo! had 65 employees. It now has three times as many, with an average of 50 open slots at any time. Little wonder that senior managers spend 30% of their time finding, hiring, and keeping the "right" people. But who are the right people?

Jeff Mallett, Yahoo!'s senior vice president of business operations, says the company has identified the core attributes behind great Yahoo! people. He says the company will simply not add new people unless they make the grade on these four factors:

People Skills: "We assume that in a short period of time, any person we hire will be responsible for managing other people," Mallett says. "So we always look for good interpersonal skills."

Spheres of Influence: "The people we hire should have their own shortlists of great talent," Mallett says "Our own people's 'little black books' are our best form of recruiting."

Zoom in, Zoom out: "We need people who can get so tactical it hurts," Mallett says, "who can do the blocking and tackling to make a project happen. That's 'zooming in.' But these same people also have to 'zoom out,' to look at the big picture: How is this project going to affect the competitive landscape?

Passion for Life: "We want people who are passionate about their subject areas," Mallett says. "And it turns out that most people who have a passion for something specific -- sports, arts and culture -- also have a passion for life. It's not just about doing great things for the company, but also great things in life."

You don't have to be high-tech to be highly selective about the people you hire, or to devise highly refined techniques to evaluate candidates quickly. Five years ago, Christopher Shipp, director of training and development at Prudential Securities, spent nine months figuring out what kind of people made great financial advisers. He researched the company's 800 top performers and identified a dozen measurable criteria.

For the last three years, Prudential has used these 12 criteria to hire new financial advisers, including 1,000 people last year alone. Candidates take a written test for experience, endure a battery of structured interviews, write a financial plan, and visit Prudential up to four times. Roughly 10 candidates apply for every person hired. The investment per hire? Between $60,000 and $100,000, Shipp estimates, including evaluation expenses, first-year training, and draws against commission. "There are no shortcuts," he says.

But there can be big payoffs. By 1996, after three years on the job, the first class of advisers hired according to the 12 criteria had generated an average of $14.5 million of client assets each -- comfortably above the company's best-case scenarios.

Get a Fast Start

it's hard for fast-growing companies to generate a pool of candidates big enough to satisfy their voracious appetites for talent. It's harder still to select the right people quickly. But there's one more challenge: to turn helpless newbies into productive contributors. Call the process what you will -- orientation, indoctrination, basic training -- it's a critical element of power staffing.

Beau Parnell, Cisco's director of human resource development, calls a new employee's first day "the most important eight hours in the world." His personal mission, he says, is to help Cisco achieve "the fastest time to productivity for new hires in the industry."

That requires work -- and technology. Last year, employee surveys at Cisco showed that some new hires felt like lost baggage rather than the company's most precious asset. Their phones didn't work. They had computers but no software. They had software but no idea how to use it. Amazingly, in a company synonymous with the Internet, they weren't getting email addresses for two weeks.

Parnell briefed CEO John Chambers and got clearance to create Fast Start, a collection of employee-orientation initiatives. Today, computer software tracks the hiring process and alerts facilities teams just before a new recruit arrives. As a result, every new employee starts with a fully functional workspace and a full day of training in desktop tools (computers, telephones, voice mail).

But Fast Start doesn't just eliminate headaches. It opens people's eyes to life inside the company. Each new hire gets assigned a "buddy" (a peer in the company) who answers questions about how Cisco works. New employees take a two-day course called "Cisco Business Essentials," which covers company history, the networking market, and Cisco's business units. Two weeks after new hires start, their managers receive an automatically generated email reminding them to review departmental initiatives and personal goals.