Building the Team
Hiring, firing, and training in a new era.
As I’ve written in my last two posts, we were fortunate to meet with Andy Taylor and members of his leadership team at Enterprise Holdings in the fall of 2011. Since then, I’ve looked for opportunities to stay in touch. I send periodic updates on how H.Bloom has grown and call or e-mail on occasion to ask questions of Enterprise’s experts in talent development. Recently, I spent time on the phone with two of their executives: Steven McCarty, a vice president in human resources, and Pam Webster, an assistant vice president in talent acquisition. What follows are some excerpts from our conversations.
Pam Webster: We Promote From Within
Q: Can you tell me about your approach to recruiting?
A: We hire 1,500 to 1,800 interns every year, mostly pre-junior and pre-senior students in college. For these students, this is not just a summer job but the on-ramp for a full-time position after college. We hire over 8,000 college graduates per year who enter our management-training program. Forty to 50 percent of these hires are from employee referrals. Over 60 percent of them make it successfully through the program and continue on in their career at Enterprise. For those that leave before the end of their training, we hope that they have developed new skills that they can take to another company.
Q: Why do you hire so many recent college graduates?
A: It is a fundamental part of the Enterprise culture that we promote from within. We aren’t necessarily looking for a specific school that someone goes to or the degree that they received. We look for people who have the ability to learn, who can set goals and achieve those goals, and who want to be in a business where they can grow their careers. We believe that there are talented people on college campuses around the country, so we go to many of them – approximately 800 colleges per year.
Steven McCarty: The People Pipeline Is Like the Capital Pipeline
Q: Where did Enterprises emphasis on training come from?
A: At Enterprise, it starts with the C.E.O. It isn’t a training strategy or a people strategy; it is the way Mr. Taylor and his father before him wanted to build the business. They knew they couldn’t be on the ground everywhere all the time. But if they focused on hiring and training, they would get real leverage in the organization. Mr. Taylor has a mantra: “Take care of employees and customers first, and growth and profits will follow.” Everything we do is derived from this philosophy.
Q: How do you measure the success of your training?
A: If you scale a business with multiple entities and multiple locations, you can’t control it all. If you try to do so, you will be a bottleneck. The only way it will work is if you train people and empower them. Here’s what we do: Hire the player, not the position. Always have a farm team and rely on your own bench. Don’t hire anyone over the folks in the management-training program. Promote from within instead, and always have people ready to take on a new role.
The people pipeline is a lot like the capital pipeline. If you don’t have money, you’ll go out of business. Well, if you’re out of good people, the same thing will happen. It is so much harder to evaluate people from the outside during an interview process than it is having everyone start at the bottom of the organization and continuously promote from within. Nearly all of our management positions are promoted from within. The only exceptions are specialty positions – software engineers, attorneys, etc.”
As I said before, we focus on employees and customers first, and expect that profits and growth will follow. Therefore, profits and growth suggest that the training of our employees has worked. We track and measure four areas: one, customer service; two, growth; three, profit; and four, employee development and retention. These are measured and ranked monthly, and we have seen a direct correlation between employee development and the other metrics. Markets that score high on employee development are almost always on top for service, growth and profit.
Q: How do you conduct regular training?
A: The branch manager is the sunrise and sunset for every employee on the team. The manager is responsible for a new employee’s training after the formal new-hire training. The manager has a general guideline provided by headquarters but is otherwise responsible for that employee’s growth. Centralized training only occurs at critical inflection points: new-hire, promotion, etc. The rest of talent development happens between manager and employee. Managers know that they will be evaluated by the scorecard each month, and they have incentive compensation hanging in the balance.”
Q: How do you make sure that your employees retain the lessons learned in training?
A: It’s interesting. We get a lot of questions like, “What training do you do?” or “How do you make sure that it sticks?” I’d rather start with this question: “What behavioral change do you want to see?” Once you ask the question of the behavior you are trying to achieve – extraordinary customer satisfaction, or more sales – you can develop solutions: training, stack ranking, holding the manager accountable, incentives, etc. Once you develop the strategy, you have to measure everything regularly.
Q: If you were going to give advice to a company on how to start a training program, what would it be?
A: H.R. is one of the last department heads that I would hire. You should do it only after the culture of talent development is established. You want the H.R. team to be the guardian, not the owner. The C.E.O. should own this.
One final thought: our success at Enterprise is a true blessing. We know that we are really fortunate. There is a danger, though, that when you get this large, you stop asking questions and learning new things. A conversation like this with a start-up like H.Bloom provides a fresh perspective. You’re calling me to learn from Enterprise, but we’re learning from you as well.”
Bryan Burkhart is a founder of H.Bloom. You can follow him on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/why-some-companies-promote-from-within/?partner=rss&emc=rss
