Again I’ll pick up right where I left off at the end of Attracting Quality Job Applicants. At this point we had crafted our job application to act as a natural filter by making the application process take a little thought, and we had promoted the posting using our sites and social media accounts, the career center websites at local colleges, LinkedIn, and Craigslist.

Reviewing the Applications

Pretty quickly applicants started coming through. Not a gigantic wave, but we would get one or two a day. The goal was to evaluate these applicants enough to decide whether or not they made it to the next round, which consisted of three sample customer service questions (more on that below).

The first thing that we were looking for was whether or not the applicant followed directions. If they didn’t follow our instructions on the cover letter, or if they failed to put the correct subject line in the email, or any of the other built-in filters that I touched upon in that last post, they were eliminated from further contention.

If they followed the instructions, we’d review their cover letter to see how well they answered each of the questions. We’d review their resume to see if they had relevant experience. We’d also pay very close attention to grammar mistakes and sloppy formatting. This person – as well as probably anyone else we hire – had to have a strong attention to detail.

Shockingly, I’d say maybe a third of the people who applied were atrocious. Their inability to spend 30 minutes applying for a job, one that could provide for them and their families for many years to come, is sad to say the least. They were put into the “no” pile right away. Another third did a very solid job and were easy passes on to the next round. The final third were tough – they had an error here and there, but for the most part they were minor and potentially something that could be overlooked. People are human after all, you don’t want to eliminate a potential hire early on simply because of a typo or something along those lines.

We decided to make these decisions by consensus. There are three of us. There weren’t that many applicants. We thought it best that everyone saw every application. One person might miss something that another picks up upon. When an app came through, the first person to review it would email the others with their thoughts and then once everyone had chimed in we’d email back and forth as long as it took to come to a consensus. Generally this took less than half a day. Immediately I would then contact them. Speaking of contacting them…

Communicating with Applicants

Before we go any further I wanted to expound upon one of my reasons that most hiring processes suck:

It’s a very uncomfortable process for the applicants. They never know where they stand or what’s next. It’s not uncommon for someone to wait weeks before hearing a response from a company they apply to.

We’ve all been on the other side of the hiring fence, and we all hate this uncertainty. I’m sure you dislike it as much as I do. That’s why we contacted everyone as soon as we made a decision throughout the entire process. Generally within a day or two we would let the candidate know where they stood, whether they were moving forward or not. I feel like doing this is only fair. The least that you can do for someone is to let them know where they stand. It hopefully makes a stressful process a little less stressful. It is, after all, people’s livelihoods that we’re talking about here. It pisses me off how poor most companies are at this, and I’ve always vowed never to let my company treat people with such disregard.

The Next Round

If a candidate was a “yes” to continue forward, we sent them an email thanking them for their application and notifying them that “in the coming days” we would be contacting them with more information about the job as well as some sample customer service questions that we wanted answered within three business days.

This was one of those things we did by design. First, we wanted to see who took the time to write back and say “thank you.” Each email back and forth was another data point on how well they communicated. I think everyone except one person wrote back. Not writing back wouldn’t disqualify them, but it certainly wasn’t a positive.

We also wanted to forewarn them of the impending three-day limit on the responses because that was an absolute deal-breaker for us. If they couldn’t spend 30-45 minutes on writing samples over the course of three business days than they weren’t cut out for a job where there will be lots of writing quick email responses.

I generally waited a day or two and then sent them that next email. In it there were three sample customer service questions. This technique was taken directly from that 37signals job app that I mentioned in the first post. Each one was pretty easy to answer by spending a few minutes on Detailed Image. We asked them to “provide a concise yet thorough answer as if you were an employee helping out this customer via e-mail, using our website as a reference.” Here’s a sample:

“I just purchased my first BMW and I want to take really good care of it but I have no idea where to start. Can you help point me in the right direction so I can clean and protect this car inside and out?”

The good answers linked to our Detailing Guide, Ask a Pro Blog, and/or Starter Packages, as well as congratulating the customer on their purchase and also inviting them to contact us any time if they had any further questions.

For each of the three questions, we had a variety of possible answers that we’d accept, and for the most part everyone who answered the questions did a very good job.

Being Upfront With Candidates

One of the other things I mentioned that I hate about most hiring processes is that:

It’s not uncommon for a last-minute deal-breaking curveball (salary, hours, location, etc) to appear that wasn’t communicated early on that would have saved everyone a bunch of time.

We didn’t want this. We didn’t want to waste our time going through a long interviewing process just to find out that a candidate didn’t like something about us. Nor would they want to spend all of their free time interviewing for a job that they wouldn’t even want.

So while the job description contained a lot of information, we decided that we wanted to provide them with a thorough list of anything and everything that might sway their interest. We did this in the form of a two-page PDF that I attached when I sent over the sample questions.

We had bullets in there hyping us up a bit:

One of the best parts about a small, fast-growing organization like Pure Adapt is that we can and will adapt your job to your interests and skills. There is no ceiling at our company – if you work hard, do good work, and respect your peers, we will continue to advance you.

And:

Unlike some jobs, we will not require that you commute to work when the weather is bad. During this past winter, a particularly bad one, we closed five times due to snow storms. If we think that our employees cannot make it to work safely, we will shut the warehouse down for the day and ask you to work from home.

As well as bullets that we knew might talk some people out of the job:

We do our best to ensure that our warehouse is a safe and comfortable work environment. We provide bottled water to all of our employees, we have a kitchen area with a refrigerator and microwave, and everything is cleaned regularly. However, it is still a warehouse and it can get dusty at times, despite our best efforts. During the winter it does get cold. We generally wear sweatshirts, jeans, and winter hats most days during the winter. We replaced the heating system with a much better unit this year so we hope that it will be warmer in general, but it will still be a cool environment in the winter. Generally the Spring through Fall is great, but those extra hot summer days can be a bit warm.

We also included all of the salary and benefits information in this PDF. We debated it a little, but ultimately decided that it was best to include it upfront and get rid of people who thought the job might pay significantly more or have some benefit that we don’t offer. That said, I think we offered a great package. We did a lot of salary research on Salary.com and also used Inc.’s 2011 Compensation Guide. The total package that we offered was higher than similar jobs in our area and more comparable to this type of job in a bigger city.

In general, our thoughts are to pay someone market value for the job and then give them clearly outlined opportunities to “jump the curve” and increase their role to a position that requires more responsibilities but also has a higher market value. To me, cost of living raises are basically a given, but to get a gigantic raise there has to be a gigantic increase in value to the company. In our short history I can say that we’re more than willing to provide those raises when someone does an exceptional job. Actually, “more than willing” isn’t the right phrase. “Super pumped” is probably more like it, because that means that they’re helping our company succeed. Nothing makes me happier than rewarding someone for doing great work.

We did have a few good candidates drop out because of the information in this PDF. It sucks a little bit, but ultimately it’s for the best if we’re not a good fit for each other. Luckily we did have a nice solid group that had done great up to this point and we were ready to interview.

Interviews

Everyone we decided to interview had followed directions, been responsive and polite in their emails, and done a good job answering the sample questions. In short, we felt they all had the aptitude to do the job. What we wanted to accomplish with the interviews was to get to know them a bit personally, see if they’d be a good culture fit, and ask them a few questions. The goal was to keep the interviews short and sweet – roughly 30 minutes.

For each person the questions were different. We asked at least one behavioral based question, one question to test their problem solving skills on the spot (a good example is to play a game of twenty questions, although we used a different game in these interviews), and a few questions about their resume. The exact questions differed based upon what type of information we were looking to get from them. We wanted to address any concerns we had through those questions.

We decided to have all three of us do one single 30 minute interview. I know that it sucks for the applicant to be 1 vs 3, but again we wanted everyone to hear and see everything. Given that we’re not super experienced at hiring, we needed everyone’s full attention to detail to ensure we didn’t miss something important. We did our best to take turns asking a line of questions so that it was sort of like three 10 minute one-on-one interviews with two people watching and not three people firing questions from every direction.

To ensure that we were able to spend the full 30 minutes asking these questions, we emailed over a list of pre-interview questions for them to email back to us prior to the interview. It was both a way to save time in the interview and it also acted as one more test, one more email exchange. They were all yes/no questions like “Do you have a reliable source of transportation to our warehouse?” Stuff that you have to ask, but that isn’t worth wasting face-to-face time on.

For a location, we decided against using our warehouse for this initial interview. It’s a bit out of the way for most people in the Albany area, and it’s also difficult to find us once you enter the park. You have to get a permit from the gate and then follow pretty precise directions. We also didn’t want to interrupt the day-to-day operations by having interviewees coming in and out all day long.

Instead, we decided to rent a room at a local coffee shop, Professor Java’s Coffee Sanctuary. The location is central to almost everywhere in the Capital Region. It’s no more than a twenty minute drive from Troy, Schenectady, Albany, or any of the suburbs. It’s also a steal – $90 for three hours, and that includes food! Whatever food you order comes off the $90. We ordered dinner prior to the interviews, and offered drinks to our interviewees. The food total came to around $60 or $70, so the cost for the room was only ~$25 plus a tip. Can’t beat that! We go there semi-regularly as it is, but we’ll definitely be renting it out again anytime we need it.

Making a Final Choice

In theory, we had the best possible scenario. We had multiple candidates that we believed could do the job. After the interviews there was not an immediate consensus on who we wanted to offer the job. We had several great candidates, and they all had completely different backgrounds, which made it very difficult to compare. Ultimately we decided on the person that we felt did the best job from start to finish in the application process and also had the best long-term fit at the company. It wasn’t easy, and by no means were we 100% sure.

Once we made the decision to hire Reece, we emailed him letting him know that we’d like to offer him the job, and asked if he’d be able to come in to the warehouse for roughly an hour the following Monday. We wanted him to meet the entire team, see the warehouse environment, and then officially present him with the offer and decide upon a start date. He will be starting the first week of January and we couldn’t be more excited!

Afterword: The Risks in Hiring Like This

First and foremost, despite how logical this hiring process seems (to me anyway), it doesn’t guarantee anything. You’d need hundreds, if not thousands, of data points at all sorts of companies to determine whether or not this truly is the right way to hire someone for a position like this. I think it increased our chances of hiring the right person, but increased chances doesn’t guarantee anything other than that. It’s possible that we hired the perfect person. It’s possible that we hired the wrong person. Time will only tell. People like guarantees, but when it comes to hiring there are none. You do the best that you can and then go from there. I think it’s far more important how you handle the right or wrong person once you determine they’re the right or wrong person than it is that you pick the correct person each and every time, a goal that will prove impossible for even the best.

There is one other major risk that you have to be willing to accept when you hire like this: you might not find anyone. Sure that’s a risk with all hiring processes, but because we had a somewhat challenging application process we didn’t get hundreds and hundreds of applicants. And the applicants we did get were subject to all of the hurdles that I’ve outlined in these posts. At times we wondered if anyone would make it. Were we being too hard? Were we being unrealistic? Thoughts like that were constantly up for discussion. I’d encourage you to stick to your guns and shoot for the best of the best. Just realize that it might take longer to find the person that you’re looking for. If we didn’t like any of the applicants – a potential reality going right up to the interviews – we were fully prepared to wait until the Spring graduating class where we would have theoretically had much larger pool of candidates viewing the job boards. If you’re looking to hire someone fast, and the speed of hiring is as important as anything else (say, a seasonal hire), this process isn’t going to work.

With all of that said, I hope this series of posts was insightful and helpful. After all of the comments I’m going to edit all three posts and then turn them in to one big essay for the essay section.

Merry Christmas all!

For some jobs this is easier than others. Developers, for example, can be evaluated by their prior work and/or by giving them a small sample project to complete. A warehouse worker can be evaluated by having them come in and pack orders for a day. In both of those examples, despite being completely different jobs, you can test almost the exact working conditions relatively quickly. Customer service is much more difficult, because their prior work isn’t publicly available, and because it can take many weeks of training before they have the knowledge to answer even some of the most basic questions. The onboarding time for a customer service employee is likely going to be longer than for any other position we hire. It requires a vast knowledge of how our website works on the front-end and back-end, how we process and ship orders, and at least a basic knowledge of auto-detailing.

Thankfully, we’re not alone when it comes to this problem. 37signals has been discussing this problem on their blog, in their books, and in their podcast for a few years now, and I’ve been paying close attention. They’ve grown rapidly, and, like us, have realized that support is one of the few things that doesn’t scale nicely – it grows linearly as you grow. They also confirmed my aforementioned theory that it’s much harder to “try before you buy” when it comes to customer support. This podcast on hiring with Jason & David gives a great summary of their thoughts and experiences. Over time they’ve iterated the process to place a strong emphasis on writing samples. This is pretty obviously reflected when you take a look at one of their applications.

We used this as a starting point for our application process. You’ll see many of their fundamental ideas peppered throughout our hiring process. I can’t thank them enough for sharing their experiences publicly. It’s one thing to know that you should assess an applicants skillset, it’s another thing completely to know how to do it in a way that might actually work. They’ve hired more customer support in the past year than we may ever hire, so even with their small sample size they’ve been able to learn things and draw conclusions that we may never have on our own. Even a sentence as simple as “2-3 months on-ramp” in their application gives us a guideline for how long it should take to train someone. We thought it might take a few months, but it’s affirming to know that other companies aren’t doing it in 2 weeks.

37signals is also relatively small. Their support team is roughly 10 people. IBM’s hiring process, no matter how robust and accurate, probably never would work for us. Just like ours would probably never work for them. We needed some practical guidelines that would work for us, and they provided that, just as (hopefully) some of the information I provide here will help a few other small businesses.

The Application

Our goals with the application were: to provide a clear description of the job, to assess the candidates writing skills, to assess the candidates attention to detail, and to act as a natural filter to ensure that the applications that we did review were serious applicants. We’ve got work to do growing our company. We didn’t want to sift through hundreds of random resumes.

Our application is still posted up on our website for reference. Looking at the application, let’s break down those goals in to a bit more detail.

When it comes to providing a clear description of the job, we listed out, in order or importance, the responsibilities that this person would assume. In an effort to be as transparent as possible, we provided examples of customer service questions, links to our Wholesale, Affiliate, and Product Reviews programs, and specified that this person would have to help out in the warehouse packing orders. If you weren’t interested in all of those things, we wanted you to stop right there.

If that sounded interesting, we next created a “You…” section (borrowed from Milk, Inc.) to give candidate a detailed description of what we were looking for. There was definitely some hesitation with posting some of that info (what if they used that information to fake being the exact person we were looking for?) but ultimately we decided that honesty was the best policy and had faith that our rigorous process would expose anyone who wasn’t genuine. Not that it’s impossible for that to still happen, but we thought that the pros of being upfront more than balanced out the cons.

I thought that the “Qualifications” sentence “Bachelor’s degree in business, marketing, management, or communications, or relevant job experience is highly preferred.” was very important in communicating what type of company we are. Degrees are nice, experience is nice, but ultimately we’re not going to eliminate a candidate for not having them. “Highly preferred” doesn’t mean “required.” It’s about finding the best candidate for the job. Period.

The “Perks” section was intended to give the applicant a taste of why it’s awesome to work at Pure Adapt. We viewed selling ourselves as just as important the candidate selling themselves to us. We’re looking for a mutual fit where both parties are excited about working together. At every step of our process we devoted a substantial amount of effort in selling Pure Adapt. There’s a reason why we launched the redesigned website along with the job application. We wanted to put our best foot forward, from showcasing our design and development skills, to expressing in our writing why we’re a different employer than most.

To assess the candidates writing skills, we asked them to forgo the traditional cover letter and instead write a cover letter that explained three specific points unique to this job application. Each point required a decent amount of thought on their end. They probably never had to think of those things before, so we hoped that we were getting a completely unique and thoughtful response. The second point, “Why you want to work at Pure Adapt and not somewhere else” also required that the applicant actually spend a few minutes researching our company before writing.

The writing samples sure acted as a filter. If someone just sent a generic cover letter, or if they missed any of our required points, they were eliminated. If someone can’t come up with a decent reason why they want to work for us after reading our site and the application, we really don’t want to waste our time seriously considering them. There were also a lot of other built-in filters: we specified the email address to send the app to, the subject line, the due date, and to include both their resume and cover letter. If any of those things weren’t exactly perfect, they were eliminated.

Promoting the Listing

The most important filter of all, as we later found out, was requiring that applicants visit our website and email in their application. This was by design for sure, but we didn’t realize just how much of a deterrent that is for people. I’m over-generalizing here, but my impression is that most unemployed professionals take the “quantity over quality” approach that the 37signals guys mention in their podcast. By disabling the feature on our listings that allowed a one-click application we likely lost out on hundreds and hundreds of applicants. Our ratio of views to applicants on job boards was hundreds and hundreds to one. I’d imagine that ratio would have been much much lower had we made it easier to apply.

Again, this was by design. We weeded out the lazy people.

To promote the listing, we did four things:

1. Posted on our blogs, our social media accounts, and obviously on the Pure Adapt website.
2. Posted on the career center job search sites of all of the local colleges: Siena, St. Rose, SUNY Albany, RPI, Sage, and Union.
3. Posted the job on LinkedIn.
4. Posted the job on Craigslist.

Craigslist is obviously the most questionable. We did it because we were looking for someone local, it’s free, it was easy to just link people to the app on our site, and because other local business owners that we knew had good results with CL.

The only money that we spent to promote the listing was on LinkedIn. Job postings were 50% off during the month of October. So the $95 listing that we bought only cost $47.50. That should be a signal to anyone doing hiring that October isn’t the best month to find applicants. But it was what we had to work with, so we did the best we could.

Somewhat predictably based upon the difficulty of our application and the time of year, we didn’t receive a ton of applicants, and many of the ones we did receive were downright horrible and didn’t come close to meeting our criteria. However, in the end, we got what we wanted – a small group of talented, qualified candidates. In the next post I’ll explain how we went from the applications to making the hire.

So we set out to do something about it. While it’s impossible to pick the right person 100% of the time, we sought out anything we could do to improve our chances beyond just a shot in the dark. Over the course of the early part of 2011 we read any relevant books or articles we could get our hands on, consulted with HR professionals and HR researchers, and spoke with every small business owner we knew. All in an attempt to be the best that we can be when it comes to growing our team.

As I touched upon in my last post I’m going to devote my next few posts specifically to the hiring process that eventually led to us hiring Reece, our new “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist” (without getting into specifics about the candidates themselves of course).

I’m going to share as much as I can because I think this is an oft-overlooked topic that’s really important to discuss.  Just because something has been done one way for a long time it doesn’t mean that it should continue to be done that way.  I can’t think of anything that embodies that principle more than hiring.

So What’s Wrong With The Way People Hire?

At a high level, here’s what I think is wrong with most application processes:

• They reward interviewing skills and resume-writing skills, both of which are useless in most jobs
• They over-value “big-names”, whether it’s schools or prior employers or certifications or post-graduate degrees.
• They under-value whether or not someone has the skills (or is willing to learn the skills) that will make them good at the specific job they are applying for.
• They minimize or completely disregard whether or not someone will be a cultural fit.
• HR departments do the recruiting, resume collecting, and sometimes initial round of interviews without having any true understanding of the job, passing through unqualified candidates while rejecting qualified ones.
• It’s a very uncomfortable process for the applicants.  They never know where they stand or what’s next. It’s not uncommon for someone to wait weeks before hearing a response from a company they apply to.  It’s also not uncommon for  a last-minute deal-breaking curveball (salary, hours, location, etc) to appear that wasn’t communicated early on that would have saved everyone a bunch of time.
• They have a low success rate.  Just ask anyone who has hired 25+ people.  Usually they’re not too happy with their batting average.

In big companies the process usually goes something like this:

• R&D needs a new engineer.  They submit information about the job to HR.
• HR goes off and does whatever HR does to collect applications.  Post on Monster.com, go to job fairs, whatever.  They just try to assemble as large of a pile of resumes as they can.
• HR filters through the resumes and picks out an initial batch of applicants to interview.
• HR does a round of interviews and sets up the next round of interviews with a group of engineers from R&D.
• The team from R&D meets with and interviews the candidates, generally with minimal preparation.  They might ask about certain skills or pick specifics off of the resume to talk about, but really they either “like” someone or they don’t.  It’s very much like a first-date (more on this below).
• The team picks their top candidate based upon their resume, HR’s feedback, and their interviews, and then makes them an offer.  Occasionally there’s a personality test, and there’s usually a background check, but after that if the person accepts then that’s the end of that.

It’s not hard to see why this isn’t exactly optimal. The whole thing is extremely weak at determining whether or not someone can actually do the job!

Attempting to “solve” these problems means that as a company you have to throw away everything that you know and start from scratch.  Lucky for us, we’re small and we’re really interested in this stuff.  We were willing to put the time in because of how important hiring is to us. That meant that we had to change the rules a bit.  We weren’t going to make it “easy” to apply. We weren’t going to make it a goal to get as many applicants as possible.  The goal was to find one right person, not a bunch of wrong people.

SWAY

Some of the best research that I read along the way came from a book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior by Ori & Rom Brafman.  It was reassuring in that it made me feel like we were on the right track.

Starting on page 75 (of the paperback) they tell the story of Professor Allen Huffcutt who has spent almost twenty years studying and analyzing job interviews.  One of my favorite passages:

“Your typical unstructured interview” – the common “first-date” method – “just doesn’t do well.  We have a long history of research confirming that.”

Just how “not well” is surprising. When researchers conducted a meta-analysis they found that there’s only a small correlation between first-date (unstructured) job interviews and job performance. The marks managers give to job candidates have very little to do with how well those candidates actually perform on the job.

“You’ve got a very limited time exposure, applicants put on their best show, managers put on their best show, and – not surprisingly – you just don’t see the realities of that person in twenty minutes.

There’s also a section where Huffcutt shares the list of the top 10 most common asked job interview questions and how 9 of the 10 are utterly useless at predicting whether or not someone will be good at a job.  They’re either self-evaluating (why should I hire you?), future based (where do you see yourself in five years?), or retrospective (why did you leave your last job?).  Turns out that people are really good at lying, are bad self-evaluators, and are bad at predicting the future or what they really want…which makes those types of questions useless.

The question that wasn’t useless?  It was “what do you know about our company?” which can actually tell you if they’ve taken the initiative to research your company before the interview.

My other favorite passage:

Because they confine managers to specifics, structured interviews [where the focus is past work experience and job-related hypothetical questions] fare much better than their unstructured counterparts. The meta-analysis showed that [these interviews] are six times more effective than first-date interviews at predicting a candidates job performance.

But even then interviews aren’t that great as a predictive tool, because some people simply know how to sell themselves better than others. As counterintuitive as it sounds, you don’t need interviews at all. Research shows that an aptitude test predicts performance just as well as a structured interview.

“But then again,” Huffcutt pointed out, “everybody expects an interview.” Huffcutt’s solution is to turn the process on its head. “Given that the applicant is expecting an interview,” he offered, “the ideal system is to use the higher accuracy techniques up front to make your decision – things like mental ability tests, work samples.” Then “when you’ve identified your top candidates,” he advised, “you use an unstructured interview to really sell them on taking the job, get them excited about the company. You can use it for some very useful things, just not for the hiring decision itself.”

Bingo.  And that’s how we approached it.  Next post I’ll get in to the details.

In September we set out to hire a “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist” for Detailed Image. We recently made an offer to our leading candidate Reece for this position. He accepted and is scheduled to start in January. Reece is a recent graduate of St. Rose college. He handled everything we threw at him exceptionally (and believe me, we didn’t make things easy on our applicants). He’s also a great culture fit – his family owns a body shop and he’s a passionate sports fan, among other things. We can’t wait to get him settled in and interacting with our customers.

I mentioned in that post in September that we “spent a very long time meticulously fine tuning our hiring process for this person.” We heard repeatedly from candidates that this was unlike any other job that they applied for. While it’s fresh in my head I plan on dedicating my next few posts to exactly what we did and why we veered away from a traditional hiring process.

The good news doesn’t stop there. We also recently had another full-time employee accept an offer from us. Bobby has been working part-time for us in the warehouse while finishing up his degree in Math at SUNY Albany. It became evident very quickly that he was an extraordinarily sharp guy. He picked things up fast (he’s one of those people you only have to say something once to), he worked extremely hard, and he was extremely accurate (important for inventory or pulling/packing orders). Often times we’d notice him doing little things more efficiently than we had trained him to do. It also doesn’t hurt that he is Mike’s cousin and that I’ve known him virtually my entire life. Again there’s a perfect culture fit with Bobby.

He’s the type of person that you don’t want to let get away. It just so happened that many of our next “pain points” were right up his alley. So we made him an offer to join us upon graduation in May as an “Analyst” (or at least that’s what I’m calling the position). He is going to be assisting Mike with our accounting and finances. He is also going to work with me on what I call data analysis projects. We have been collecting data for years now. We have more data than we’ve been able to mine. With Bobby and I both having a strong statistical background, I hope we’re able to do more of what we’ve been doing – like this shipping study from a few years ago, which I’ve continued to do yearly – as well as investigate things that we haven’t been able to get to yet, such as better forecasting models, the true lifetime value of a customer (should we be willing to pay $10 or $20 or $50 for a new registered user?), and testing out about a hundred other hypotheses I have floating around in my head.

Both Reece and Bobby will be joining Charlie full-time at our warehouse every weekday. They will be assisting Charlie in the daily operations as is necessary, just as my partners and I do now and will continue to do to some extent. While Bobby wraps up school he’ll only be working part-time, but we’re going to try to get most of the training done during the semester so that he’s ready to hit the ground running in May.

We hope that this group becomes the team that helps take Pure Adapt to the next level. It’s exciting times for us!

Why? Because while I was away Greg closed on a new house. Mike and I both told him that we’d cover as much of his work as we could for the rest of the month while he got settled and took care of the plethora of projects that any new home owner is faced with. Just as Greg has covered for us when we have traveled in the past. In my case, Greg covered as much as he could for me while I was in Virginia even though he was finalizing things with the house closing. He and Mike also covered for me during the hurricane disaster.

The most important function of our business (or any business for that matter) is ensuring that our customers have a great experience with us. Sure it would be nice to get some development work done or work on some marketing projects, but those pale in comparison to making sure that every order gets shipped out quickly and accurately, and that those customers who have questions about their order get taken care of quickly. Any time one of those areas weakens, we immediately shift our resources in that direction. Could Greg have answered all of the customer service questions? Probably. But it certainly would have been stressful for him, and the customers probably would have had to wait longer to have their inquiry resolved. It makes total sense for me to shift off of development and over to customer service. This just seems completely logical to us.

There’s a nice side benefit to this: I get to see the business from a completely different perspective. As an owner, that’s hugely valuable to me. In this case, I’m answering a lot of customer service questions as we’re in the process of hiring someone to do just that. Think that will help in the interviewing and training process?

I think this is somewhat to be expected of owners of a small business. The good owners at least anyway. It becomes more difficult when you expect this level of teamwork from your employees. Everything we do has a purpose, so the last thing I ever want to hear from an employee is “I’m not doing that because it’s not my job”. That’s the antithesis of teamwork. As I look around at the people I’ve worked with over the years, it seems like this is a personality trait you either have or don’t have. If someone is out for themselves without regard for their peers or the company’s customers, no amount of structure is going to help them become a good teammate.

However, I think a company can make it easier or more difficult for someone to be a team player. If someone’s raise is rigidly tied to specific projects getting done, it’s hard to fault them for doing anything other than those projects. If, as managers, you don’t do a good job of explaining “why” you need someone to shift gears and help somewhere else, it’s hard to expect someone to be enthusiastic about it. Conversely if you tell your employees that you value and reward teamwork from the beginning, and you fully explain how that teamwork helps everyone, then I think it falls back on the person’s personality.

We’re lucky right now. Our warehouse manager Charlie is absolutely great at doing what’s best for the team. I think it’s one of his very best traits. This has never even come close to being an issue for us. However, as we keep adding people to our team, it might be more tricky. Alongside a strong work ethic, it’s arguably the most important trait you want in an employee. Depending on how good we do at the interviewing process, we may or may not end up being good at detecting it. We will however quickly get rid of anyone who isn’t’ working for the good of the team. I’m a big believer in “hire slowly, fire fast”.

However, as we started to discuss our hiring plan, we realized that the Pure Adapt website all of a sudden became a more important piece of the puzzle. We needed something that showcased our work, our personalities, and our culture. Finally this past weekend we launched a new site.

The Site

To be honest, I didn’t have a whole lot to do with this new site. The majority of the credit here goes to Mike, who did an amazing job with the design (more on that in a second). Greg then wrote all of the content. I came in at the end and did a quick round of revisions and then deployed the site.

While I was very impressed with the aesthetics and graphics that Mike came up with, I’m even more impressed with how he pushed the envelope on what a website can do today in 2011. Using HTML 5 and CSS 3, Mike created a responsive design, a relatively new concept that essentially means that the site adjusts on the fly almost flawlessly to any screen size.

For instance, it looks great on my 1080P monitor:

And an iPad:

And an iPhone:

Notice how the water at the bottom looks different on each screen size. You can see the same effects by taking your browser and resizing it.

I also love the personality that Greg and Mike infused in to the site. The community page that gives an overview of the work we do in our community is awesome. And I really love the home page. Everything from the intro line right down to the Bruce Lee quote is a perfect reflection of us. It was really important that this site did that for potential employees. We want to show applicants who we are, what we do, and how we do it, and then let them decide whether or not they’d be a good fit.

The Job

Speaking of potential applicants, as you can see on our new careers page, we’re hiring a full-time “Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support Specialist – Detailed Image”. I realize that job title is a mouth full. Honestly, it was the hardest part for us in the entire job description. We wanted something that described the job without turning potential candidates off (as opposed to say “Customer Service Representative” which, to me, invokes the thought of wearing a headset and answering phones within a tiny cubicle of a gigantic call center…and this job is so much more than that). If you want the most accurate reflection of the job, the bullets under “Primary Responsibilities” describe literally what this person will be doing. A lot of work was put in to the job description so I’ll let that stand for itself rather than rehash it all here.

If you’re interested, I highly encourage you to apply…even if you’re not currently located in Upstate, NY. While it doesn’t say this on the application, we’re open to helping relocate the right candidate to our area.

As is the case with all hires in a growing small business, this person will be the most important hire in company history. That’s magnified by the fact that 1) this is the first employee we’ve hired where we didn’t have someone we already knew in mind, and 2) the skill set for customer support is much more difficult to assess than say a warehouse worker, a designer, or a developer (the other positions we will likely be hiring in the future).

Because of this, and because we expect to get a lot of applicants (one of the benefits of doing business in the Albany area is that there are a LOT of colleges), we have spent a very long time meticulously fine tuning our hiring process for this person. We’ve consulted with other companies, various HR experts, read as many job descriptions for similar positions as we can find, and read as much research as we could get our hands on. Overkill? Maybe. But to me that just shows that we’re attacking hiring with the same passion and intensity that we do everything else. When we dive in to something new, we want to learn as much as we can so that we can put forth our absolute best. I’m really excited to see how this unfolds!

In some ways this really isn’t a big deal. Charlie, our warehouse manager, has shown that he is more than capable of running the show. There have been many days where I’ve been in and haven’t had to do much at all to keep things moving in the right direction out there. I have all the confidence in the world that today will run just as smooth as it would if I was sitting in the office.

Then again, it kind of is a big deal. Since we moved in to our warehouse in early 2008, an owner has been there every single business day. So when we made the decision to start doing this on a regular basis, it was really exciting. It gives us a lot more flexibility with our schedules. It also gives us the opportunity, for the first time, to have meetings off-site during business hours. We can grab lunch together, work collaboratively at someone’s house, and have our weekly meeting without having to stay late or get together at night or on the weekend.

We’ll all still be there at least once per week. We all have tasks that have to get done in the warehouse. Plus we all want to make sure that we’re still involved in the day-to-day operations semi-regularly because we see value in that. And of course there will be plenty of days where it’s so busy that we have to go in to help pack orders to ensure that they get out in time.

While I truly enjoy the atmosphere at the warehouse, it’s also not the right environment for me to get much of my work done. There’s a lot of social interaction, and a lot of interruptions. I can get email and small tasks accomplished, but if I have to sit down and do some serious development I highly prefer the peace and quiet of my home office.

Right now we’re only doing this for one day a week, but the plan is to have the right team in place in the next 3 – 6 months that allows us to do this on the average business day. Once that happens it will be a huge change for all of us. This is sort of the beginning of that, which is why I think it feels like such a big step.

But some did. What did the Red Sox do for these crazy dedicated fans? They announced over the PA system that fans could go sit anywhere they wished. Many people who could never afford seats behind home plate or on the green monster were able to see a Major League Baseball game from an amazing viewpoint. Their ownership team also served free hot chocolate and coffee to fans. The pictures have been making their way around the internet today thanks to a TwitPic by Linda Pizzuti Henry, owner John Henry’s wife.

John Henry is worth an estimated $1.1 billion. He could have stayed in his luxury suite and had his staff give away the free drinks. But he didn’t. He got out there and said “thank you” to his very best customers by serving them himself. Imagine being a lifelong Red Sox fan and season ticket holder (which, by the way, cost over $2k for the cheapest single seat) who has toughed out this game because of how much you love your team. You stay the entire game at all 81 home games, no matter what. This is your life. And then in between innings you get up to get a drink and not only is it free, it’s being served to you by one of the owners. That might not mean all that much to you and I, but I assure you to that person it’s a night they’ll never forget and a story that they’ll tell for years to come.

He also set an example for his employees. In a big organization with lots of layers it’s easy for there to be an attitude of “I’m too good for that” where each level doesn’t think they should ever have to do the work of those below them. But if the owner is willing to serve hot chocolate on a freezing cold night, no one is too good for any job. If something needs to get done to help a customer or a fellow employee, then do it, irrespective of your title or seniority.

As we’ve grown, Mike, Greg, and I have become increasingly removed from many of the day to day functions of our business. As we continue to add staff, that will undoubtedly continue. No matter how big we get or how removed we get, we really see the value in making sure that we get involved in the day to day stuff on a semi-regular basis. That we go in early to help on a busy day. That we do a menial task here and there to free up our employees to do something more important. Not only does it create a hard working, teamwork-driven, egalitarian culture, it also keeps us in tuned to what it’s like to work in our warehouse on a daily basis.

Case in point. A few weeks back we were super busy and we went in on a Sunday to get a head start packing orders, just my partners and I. During that time we did things like pull and pack orders in the warehouse that we hadn’t done in a while, and in doing so we started to think through how they could be done faster or more accurately, or how they could be done simpler so they were easier to learn for future employees. There’s no way to replicate that. We’ve already implemented a few of those ideas, with our warehouse manager Charlie’s input of course, and there is more to come. By doing this we also guard against trivializing the work that gets done out there. To do those jobs well, it’s hard work and it’s tiring work, and sometimes you need to get out there and do it to be able to appropriately relate back to your employees.

Given that we each only come in two days per week (everyone on Monday, one person each of the other four days), there was a big need for someone to “own” the growing warehouse responsibilities on a consistent day to day basis. We envision him being the person who trains and manages all of the other part-time (and maybe full-time) warehouse employees as we grow.

We’re super excited to have him on full-time.

Internally, what we had to get done to make the hire happen was very interesting. We had to bulk up our company policies documentation. We had to define his role. We had to decide on a benefits package – we’re covering the full cost of health insurance, something we plan to do for all of our employees. We had to get him a key to the building. We had to set up a laptop for him. We had to set him up on Google Apps and give him the appropriate access levels to various features. And that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. It’s been an ongoing process for several months, one that will hopefully set us up to hire full-time employees for years to come.

We’ll begin to reap the benefits of having him around right away. Already today he was responsible for opening the warehouse before we got there, and shutting it down after we left. For now, we’ll be keeping our schedules, but long term this opens up the possibility for us to get together during business hours – say for a meeting, collaborative work, or even a meeting with our lawyer (something that we previously have had trouble scheduling) – while still knowing that the warehouse is being taken care of by someone we trust.

The other immediate benefit of having Charlie around will be to “cut the cord” on some of the communication between Greg and the rest of us. Greg handles customer service and inventory ordering, both of which require him to be in constant contact with the warehouse. Sometimes it can get tricky when he needs to talk to me on Tuesday, George on Wednesday, and Mike on Thursday. Now he can communicate directly with Charlie all of the time. This should really help simplify things and eliminate some communication mishaps.

In the big picture, it just feels good to create a job, hopefully a good job that can provide a good life to Charlie for a long time. And given that we bootstrapped our way to profitability, this isn’t a job where we’re spending our angel investment to hire a bunch of people in hopes that we’ll eventually make enough money to be able to justify keeping them on. It’s a real live job that isn’t going anywhere. It’s one of the most important roles that small business owners play in helping the local region that they do business in, and the economy as a whole.

Last night I finally went on to the CBS website and watched the first episode of Undercover Boss. The premise of the show is pretty interesting – presidents/CEOs of large companies go “undercover” and work as front-line employees for their own organizations. The assumption being that they’ll see things completely differently if they work in the positions that directly interact with their customers.

And of course that’s what happened in the first episode. It featured president and COO of Waste Management Larry O’Donnell. WM is a great first company because 1) they are huge 2) Larry was really really excited to learn from the experience, and 3) they have the shittiest possible jobs to do…literally. The episode can be watched in full online. Unlike 99.99% of the shows on television, this may actually make be worth watching on a regular basis.

In this instance, O’Donnell made it a point to correct some of the injustices that his employees encountered. Which was awesome. It was nice to see him take action. But it was even better to see him connect this to the big picture. Several times he said how his cost cutting initiatives to make the company more efficient were backfiring in ways that he couldn’t have imagined.

In a large organization like WM, this is a huge problem. The people making the policies are often several levels away from those enacting them. It seems like total common sense, but even in a large company like WM, you have to have some connection to your front line employees that are actually doing the day to day work and interacting directly with your customer base. Larry and his board really didn’t understand their own business.

The answer for most businesses isn’t going on a reality show. But that doesn’t mean that whomever is putting a new process in place shouldn’t actually do it themselves for a day or two. You can learn so much more than any amount of data can give you by just doing it and talking to those who do it on a daily basis. It seems like a waste of time but – as this show is probably going to prove every single week – it’s often the best use of an executive’s time.

There absolutely has to be a regular feedback loop where management solicits information from the people who are doing the actual work. If you empower them at their own job they’ll be much happier and more productive, and you’ll develop more efficient processes as a result of it (and in the end make more money and be more profitable). Again, seems like common sense, but how many businesses actually do it?

Now, in a small business like ours this is much easier but still not impossible to screw up. We’re at the point where the owners are all trying to remove ourselves from the day to day operations of our warehouse. By the end of the year it’s a pretty safe assumption to say that we’ll have a full time warehouse manager and 1-3 part time employees reporting to him.

All of a sudden we’ll be a step removed from our part time employees. It’s not too hard to see how we could lose touch with them while we “focus on more important things”. But the most important thing is always how your existing business operates on a day to day basis. If customers aren’t being taken care of in a way that meets our standards, nothing else really matters.

One of the reasons that our systems have worked so well is that we’ve designed them for us to use. We build it, we try it, and we tweak it, based upon our own feedback (and now the feedback of Charlie and John). We won’t always be the ones pulling the orders or stocking the shelves on a daily basis (in fact, we rarely do that stuff now), but we have to make a commitment to do it somewhat regularly…especially when we make a change to our processes. And we need to make sure our employees feel empowered to tell us what works, what doesn’t, and their ideas for improvement.

I think for the most part we’ve done that so far. Each of our employees has made several suggestions that have been implemented and made the system as a whole better, which I think is a good measuring stick for this kind of stuff – their willingness to speak up, and our willingness to implement. But as we grow it will take more of a concerned effort to achieve.

Today I was in the warehouse by myself (Mike was sick, the other guys all had stuff going on). It was the first time since the holidays that I pulled orders. It was a good thing. It reminded me what the job was like. It got my mind off of some of the other projects I was on and for one day got me thinking about the things that our employees think about. It was a very good use of my time, which is something I’ll hopefully always keep in the back of my mind.

If I don’t, I’m sure I’d end up like the millions of other business owners who make decisions based upon numbers on a screen without being able to consider the true impact that it will have on their employees, their customers, and inevitably their bottom line.