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• 
• The Naked Business: I hired from Twitter
• 
• The Secret of Flexible Labour: How to Hire a Little Bit of a Person
• 
• Employees: Can’t Live with Em, Can’t Live Without Em
• 
• Naked Business: Building a Wall of Sound
• 
• Entrepreneurs Guide to Understanding Why We Buy What We Buy. Understanding Consumers.
• 

By Doug Richard

Last week I began a story about how, with my nominal time management skills, my overflowing inbox, a small business with no offices, more opportunities than we can manage and which we struggle to prioritise, a current business model that has not yet proven itself, and a conscious unwillingness to say “no”; I temporarily lost my composure and decided that, if I just had a shadow, I would be immediately more productive.

It was not a rational response to my irrational issues. But then perhaps an irrational response is what an irrational issue requires. So I tweeted.

I tweeted that I wanted a shadow; someone who would follow me around dealing with the management of the consequences of my actions. Every meeting I attend spawns emails, follow-ups, commitments to make introductions, documents, proposals and other worthwhile stuff. Every phone call has the same effect. Sometimes just sitting on the train to London, or in a Cafe Nero will deliver an unexpected opportunity. And many of them do not get attended to. Some of them shouldn’t be attended to. Most of them do not need me attending to them.

Thus, my shadow. I calculated that there would be some person out in the world whose self interest would be served by meeting my world, learning what I know by osmosis and taking on a series of increasingly more complex and challenging tasks culminating in a level of accomplishment that they had not possessed. I figured that the value was such, if I found the right person, that they would also have a value to me that was equal or greater. In theory, the quid pro quo would be such that I didn’t have to pay them.

But people don’t work for free for me, even when they offer to. It doesn’t work. So I set the pay at minimum wage, which is currently around £800 per month. Hardly a draw in itself, thus assuring myself that no one would take the job for the money.

As I mentioned last week, I received many enquiries. Because I was already overwhelmed, I chose to speed read their responses and filter them on first impressions, correctness of spelling and whatever personality leaked through the twitter or subsequent resume and letter.

It is as good an approach as any. Because the one thing I do know, having hired thousands of people and let an equal or greater number go over the course of my career, is that however good your instincts, whatever your gut tells you, no matter what interview methodology you use, you actually have no idea who the person you are talking to really is.

We are strangers until we are not. We can work side by side with someone for a decade and not know the first thing about their private life. They may harbour secret passions or secret lives or unusual interests. They may be kleptomaniacs stealing supplies steadily over the years until their garage has more inventory than the local Staples. They may be part of a witness protection program who have been relocated to the next cubicle and re-named Hazel because no one would ever think that Hazel saw the gruesome gangland killing in the first place.

And their resume is not the place you will find out. In the land of CVs we are each solely responsible for any success that happened nearby us whilst we were there. Every success has many parents, and cousins and brothers too.

We won’t find out in the interview which is more like a kabuki play or a Greek tragedy where the outcome is inevitable and our greatest weakness is our perfectionist instinct and our insistence on over-working.

We won’t know by first impression because sociopaths make great first impressions.

We can’t know from references because they are only references because they are prepared to say good things about us.

We remain strangers until we cross some invisible line and through the alchemy of friendship or collegiality we slowly begin to know and understand someone else.

The good news is that we don’t need to know someone to hire them. We merely need to enjoy their company and be willing to set goals that they can meet and which we can measure.

We merely need to ensure that, if they are better at selling themselves to bosses than working with peers, we have a means to hear what our employees are saying and be perceptive enough to remember than all business processes depend on the cooperation of groups of people.

As it happens, a fellow came along in response to my tweet who was wildly over-qualified for the job but who, as I had hoped, saw that it was in his self interest to shadow me. The fact that he was a successful 31 year old trial lawyer from California, with all the analytic, organisational communications and life skills that implies was not lost on me. And by virtue of his wife getting a great job in the UK he had precipitously decided to drop his career and start over in a new country in a new profession. He figured shadowing me would get him out of the house and into the company of interesting people and give him an accelerated course in business development, however iconoclastic an approach I might take.

So he got the job. And he negotiated what he wanted. (But the he would wouldn’t he). And I hired him.

Thus it was all the more disappointing when he was offered a job the next day doing what he aspired to do after working for me for six months. Like any smart person he took that job. My loss.

As it happens I also interviewed a number of other wonderful people. In fact all five of the people I interviewed would have done a good job at the job. But I have been so busy that I haven’t even had a chance to get back to them. Though now that I’ve written this post I feel even more urgently the need to provide closure on this.

Oddly enough, we also found a new employee. Not my shadow; she’s got too much talent in other areas for that. She is a natural marketer, a social media intuit and meshed with the team in a heartbeat. So we hired her for a position that didn’t exist as an apprentice. That is, assuming she continues as she started, she shall become a member of our full time team at the end of her apprenticeship.

I, on the other hand, still need a shadow.

Tags: building a team, doug richard, hiring, internship, naked business