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How Do You Find A Good Employee?

John Liu
10 years ago

I was in Boston this week, and had dinner with a good friend. He was lamenting the difficulty of finding good employees.

My friend has a very small specialty clothing company. It is pretty much a one-man show. He designs the clothes, orders the samples, brings them to the trade shows, gets orders, has the product made overseas and shipped to him, receives the shipments, inventories the product, labels and ships it out, bills and collects, handles returns and so on. The business is just starting to get off the ground, so he needs someone to do, well, the office stuff. Track inventory, pack and ship, handle bills and billing, answer and make phone calls, check shipper quotes, etc.

He just hasn't found anyone good. If they can enter inventory numbers in the computer, they don't want to break down boxes and apply shipping labels. If they can open boxes, they can't figure out what task to do next, or don't have the work ethic to look. If they have the work ethic, they can't speak English. And so on. Just recently, he had to let his latest employee go when he discovered she wasn't doing many of the things she said she was - like keeping track of what inventory is in stock vs shipped out.

How would you, in his shoes and in that sort of an urban location, look for the right employee? He was going to advertise on Craigslist, I think he'll be buried in flakes. I told him to use an employment agency, he thinks they charge a lot. He's tried tapping his network of friends but sounds like that's coming up dry. It feels like there should be some out-of-the-box thing to do.

(Over here on the other side of the country, we had a similar issue. Our office manager left to go get her MBA. She gave us three months' notice. We waded through hundreds of resumes and dozens of phone interviews, then in office interviews, no one suitable - finally we gave up and contacted an employment agency, and will be hiring one of their candidates shortly. We feel stupid that we couldn't find anyone on our own, but it was just taking too much time and we don't want to spend another month without an office manager.)

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