How To Make A Great Agency Hire

    Few tasks are harder – or more important than making a good hire.  A good hire can take your agency to the next level. A bad one can wreck it.

    Most hires are made amid crisis. There’s a new client, and an immediate need to meet new demands. Or a key person has deserted ship, and new blood is needed to fill the hole. But while filling a slot because “anybody is better than nobody” may solve a temporary crisis, it can create larger problems down the road – and may even lead to the loss of a client.

    So here are a few hard-won tips to making the best possible hire:

• Put the portfolio in context: Everyone loves to show – and look at – portfolios.  But there are inevitably a lot of fingers in every creative and strategic pie, and rarely does a finished product reflect a single person’s work.  Additionally, portfolios can only show you what a person has done for someone else.  It is much more important to know what they can do for you.  A better test is to show them work in progress and ask them to critique it.  Do they start by asking smart questions, like what is the strategy, who is the target market, and what results is the client trying to achieve? Listen carefully to their analysis. Do they focus on the copy, design or the strategy?  That will tell you a lot about how they will approach future problems.

• Look beyond “impact:” The hiring process, like many other activities in agencies, is infected with buzzwords – “passion,” “impact,” “driven,” etc. Unfortunately, these attributes can also be the force behind a boss from hell or a disruptive co-worker. Instead, look for three skills that will increase the productivity of your office and make clients happier.  These skills are diplomacy, or the ability to manage relationships between teams or individuals; responsibility management, or the ability to ensure that problems are not passed to someone else; and idea triage – knowing when to say “yes” to ideas and, more importantly, when to let ideas die.

• Provoke a reaction: The agency business is like rugby, a full-contact sport. You don’t want someone who can’t dodge or bounce back after a hit. During the initial interview, find a mistake in the resume, criticize an offering in the portfolio, pick apart their skills. See how they respond. Do they get defensive or even angry? Or do they take it as an opportunity for improvement?

• Focus on the hire, not the fire: Most interviews are focused on finding reasons not to hire someone. Instead, look for reasons to hire someone. What are the unique skills or experiences that you can leverage to go after new clients? How well do they complement an agency strength? If you only come out of an interview finding faults with the prospect, you are not thinking about how to grow your organization.

• Shut up: Executives will spend the bulk of interview time talking about their agency, clients, campaigns, blah, blah, blah. A good candidate will know much of that already. The candidate should do 80% of the talking. Just ask smart questions – and listen hard. A good candidate will also ask you smart questions. Be suspicious of anyone who just wants to know about vacations and benefits.

• Don’t let managers hire direct reports: If the goal is to upgrade organizational skills, don’t let managers hire those that they will be directly supervising. There is a natural human tendency not to hire anyone who might represent a future threat. Instead, let the manager’s manager make the final decision.

   “How to make a great hire” is one of the skills that they don’t teach in schools, unfortunately. While a bad campaign will quickly disappear beneath the waves, a bad hire will sabotage an agency for months or even years. So take your time and do it right. Hire in haste, repent in leisure.

Comments

[Young Walton Jr]

"Don’t let managers hire direct reports"

This is an excellent point. If only more companies embraced this as a corporate policy they would inevitably do better than they are now. I know Walmart has implemented this as a policy but not sure how many others do. Thanks for the great insights!

[Bruce DeBoer]

Excellent, excellent, excellent!

My experience has been that, while it doesn't guarantee success to find great hires – as you pointed out – it can hasten your demise if you don’t.

The last agency I worked at was poorly managed by the principals, but they sure did hire good people. It was those good people that moved the agency forward, and generally not the principals. For that reason I was able to maintain respect for them; they knew what they were doing on the HR side. If that’s all they did right, they earned everything they got.

Thanks for the tips.