You want the crème de le crème working at your estate planning practice. How can you ensure that candidates really have what it takes to become great members of your team and enhance your firm? The process starts with their resumes and interviews, but it shouldn’t end there. It’s not difficult for less qualified people to create hyped resumes, and good interviewing skills do not necessarily translate into superior work performance. How do you find the best people? The answer is complex and not necessarily intuitive.
The Threat of the Reference Check
How can you weed out less than stellar candidates who might give a good interview but who later reveal their incompetence/craziness/laziness after the paperwork’s dried on their contract?
One solution involves using a technique known as the Threat of the Reference Check (TORC). Brad Smart’s bestselling book, Topgrading, which has won plaudits from CEOs of mega corporations and has served as a kind of recruiting bible for over thirty years, discusses the power of TORC. Here how it works:
- Candidates are informed from the start that you will contact former managers. This process automatically weeds out people who don’t want you knowing the truth. You don’t waste time with inferior applicants.
- After the interview, candidates must arrange to send you the contact information and availability of their managers. You call these individuals at the designated times.
- If a candidate doesn’t want you to contact a current employer, ask to contact former managers at the same level as the current manager.
Best Hiring Practices
TORC allows you to screen candidates rapidly – and only the cream rises to the top. With the right software, your hiring practices can flow smoothly. Ideally, you want to see each candidate’s entire employment history in chronological order, along with salary expectations, former manager ratings and their reasons for moving on.
The right ideas (like TORC) combined with the right software can supercharge not only your recruiting but also every other process and system in your business. Please review WealthCounsel’s suite of software products to discover solutions for your estate planning firm, or contact us for insights.
