Friday, August 28, 2009
Building The SWAN Team
Categories: Management, People 0 commentsAfter many years of hiring people, last year I stumbled upon a simple hiring concept that I think is worth sharing. I wish I could take credit for the simplicity of it, but I can't. The practice is used by many larger consulting firms today. The truth is that I have always followed the principal by nature without thinking of it, but the concept works and its a great guideline to get everyone of your managers hiring by the same criteria. Hiring people in the technical industries can be difficult. | ||
| At my company we need thinkers and doers, inventors and implementers, designers and troubleshooters. Sometimes one person contains all of these skills, though more often a team comes together to complement each others' skills. The whole is greater than the parts. This successful practice is known as following the SWAN Model: Hiring employees that are Smart, Work Hard, Ambitious and Nice. Though hard to gauge at an interview, these qualities almost guarantee a decent worker. When hiring a non-entry-level person, the SWAN model, coupled with what they've done in the past, is a far better indicator of success than any resume. When it's time to hire, most hiring managers will look for the standard requirements, probably including some sort of specific experience or skill set. However, the SWAN concept focuses more on an individual's personal attributes than where they obtained their degree or what their specific experience is. |  Photo by: suvodeb | |
WHAT IS A SWAN? We have found that SWANs likely have what it takes both to help our clients and to be successful at our company. "SWAN" is an acronym for people who possess four qualities: Smart, Work hard, Ambitious, and Nice. Smart Look for people with keen minds who may have pursued a variety of academic interests and demonstrated achievement in their chosen fields. Once these people join your company, they can turn their intellects on the problems facing your clients and develop creative, effective solutions. Work hard Being smart is not enough to succeed at most companies, the employee must also be willing to apply themselves every day. Try to look for people who have demonstrated their ability and willingness to work hard through academic/professional achievement and extracurricular involvement.Ambitious Identify people who set high goals for themselves and then strive to achieve those goals. They don't have to be striving to be the CEO, but they clearly need to have goals beyond just getting a job.Nice Many companies seek to hire people who are smart, hard working, and ambitious and discount the last attribute. However, most technical consulting positions require a great deal of customer and team interaction, and they need to meet the additional requirement of being nice to be around. Teams will perform better when the team members are naturally nice to each other and work together. There is other information on the web about this subject if you do a search, but sometime in the future I will share more about how you may go about filtering out the SWANS from the Ugly Ducklings. | ||
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