To get the right people in the door, you have to do a lot of deliberate work. You have to set expectations, find good candidates and make sure they’re ready to take on challenges.
It’s a big investment, but it’s worth it. After it’s all done, you have an empowered group of people who don’t need much managing. This is how companies like Zappos operate. They spend lots of time interviewing and screening to make sure they’re hiring the right people. After the training process, employees are offered a few thousand dollars to quit on the spot.
Picture that. You’ve interviewed for a job, gotten trained for a couple weeks and now you could walk home with $3,000. Do you do it?
It’s a clever program and it’s intentionally designed to weed out people who aren’t committed to working at Zappos for the long haul. That’s just one example of frontloading the filter so that only the right people come in the door. It’s much easier to make the door harder to get into that it is to make people leave once they’re inside.
Don’t sugarcoat how easy the journey might be. Talk about the hard parts. Frontload the filter and you’ll have more commitment from the very start.