Hiring Key People for Your Company

As I talk to other business owners, large and small, we share the opinion that hiring the people that match your culture is getting harder. Hiring has always been difficult but somehow these past few years it is getting harder. Here is the thing that has always been true; there is no magical age to hire a person, there is no magical personality; frankly many have taken the tests often enough they know how to answer the questions Of course other demographics do not matter.

I am thinking one of the questions I might add to our interviews is how do you prepare for a disaster in your home, whether fire, flood, or wind what do you do to protect your home and family. The reason why is that when you are watching the internet and see how people reacted to the storms from Helene, what did you see? You saw people who did not get enough notice, that is awful. You saw people who had a lot of notice and did nothing but plan a party and you saw other people trying to save their homes and keep their family safe and what they did to do that, sandbagging, boarding up, and moving away from the storm. I think the person that I don’t want to hire is the person who stays and rides the storm out in their kayak in the living room.

I am thinking about this because as a company I don’t want to be like the plastics company in NC that made their employees work until it was too late for them to evacuate their families and they drowned in the river while working at the factory. I want to be the company that says you home and family first.

However, when the power is out for weeks and they can’t get back to work what are our responsibilities? Do we ask them to us PTO if they can not come back to work for weeks? If PTO is used up do we ask them to take unpaid leave? Or do we pay them while paying overtime to the rest of the team?  What are our obligations? Knowing that the company will also have storm loss and costs?  If they are key people and they are not planning on their return to work should they be key people? If they are key people floating in the kayak how much help do we provide? Or should we?

 

Just some things to think about. My two cents—Penny Garbus