Ask Yourself 1 Question to Ensure You Don’t Hire the Wrong Person

Good People = Great Success

The people you hire are arguably the biggest factor that ensures the success or failure of your business. This could not be more true for start-ups and smaller companies where everyone has to do more, be a bit of an expert in different areas and cover more bases.

Not only is it a big investment in terms of salary and all the benefits involved, bringing the wrong person into a company can have disastrous effects.

A person who brings a bad attitude to the group can destroy team morale, upset clients, and even have a fatal impact on the long-term reputation of the business.

It is often hard to tell from a 1-hour meeting what a person is truly like and how they would perform. We spend too much focus on bits of paper that list experience and achievements.

But this all counts for nothing if the person is a dick.

The one question you need to ask yourself before hiring anyone is:

Would you long or short the person’s character if they were a stock?

This basically means, would you invest in their value going up (long) or down (short) over time.

This may sound like an inhuman approach, but this is not the case. You are looking at the character of the interviewee and if they are a good person with a good work ethic most of all.

If someone has a good character and gets on well with others, everything else can be taught. If you give them the right tools and they have the right attitude, their value is likely to go up. You would long that person. With the right training, their stock will rise.

If however, they give off bad energy, complain a lot, and are negative, even with the right guidance their value is likely to remain the same or even go down as they are dragging others down too. If they were a stock you would short this person.

Sometimes it is hard to gauge this in an interview and we are not always a good judge of character. If you hire someone and soon realize that they have bad character, the best thing to do for all parties is to cut your losses early.

As job applicants, we often complain about there being 58,000 stages of interview and 42,000 online tests to do. But companies do this to ensure they get the right person in.

And knowing the impact a bad egg can have on the rest of the egg clutch, you can hardly blame them.

If people show their true colors, you don’t need to give them the benefit of the doubt. For smaller businesses, you can’t take the risk on bad eggs.

I’d be shorting the hell out of Putin right about now.

In business and in life, good must always prevail.