Who decides who decides

The owners who call me usually open with a people problem. Cannot find good techs. Cannot keep the ones they find. Hired somebody in the spring who was gone inside a month.

Walk it backward one step and the people problem is a hiring problem. Walk it back one more and the hiring problem is sitting on two decisions that were made before anybody filled in an application.

The first is what the department is for. The second is who is allowed to decide who comes into it.

Both of those belong to leadership and to whoever is handling HR, which in a small shop is the owner and one person he trusts. Neither one feels like a decision while it is happening. They get made in a hallway.

I have sat in hiring processes where the people doing the deciding had no business deciding. They had never done the work. They could not describe what good looked like in that seat past a few words anybody could say. So they chose on the one instrument they had, which was whether they enjoyed the conversation.

That instrument is real and it measures something. It measures how a person interviews.

Somebody who has never done the function can tell you whether he liked the candidate. Past that he is guessing.

So the seat fills with a pleasant person who is wrong for it. Six months on, the labor market gets the blame.

The labor market is tight. It is also carrying the blame for something decided in a hallway.

What a good decider knows is narrow and very specific. What does this seat actually produce. What does a strong week in it look like. What is the one thing a person here does that separates the ones who stay from the ones who do not. Someone who has done the function answers all three cold.

You can fix this without a consultant and without buying anything. Before the next opening goes out, decide on paper who is deciding, and write down what that person knows about the function. If the sheet comes back thin, put somebody beside them who has done the job. I would rather have a lead tech in the room than a better job post.

The second half of it is slower. If the department itself was never defined, the hire is a guess no matter who runs the interview. That is the older problem, and it is where the chair came from.