The Hiring Multiplier

One of the great skills of a person who effectively executes an idea is the ability to identify and attract people more skilled than himself. No doubt, many big challenges require significant human resources; and ability to acquire that resource makes the short list of necessary skills for the Executive Übermensch.

In other words, knowing how to get really good people to work on your project is really important.

Getting really good people is done in two steps. You have to find and identify them, and you have to convince and incentivize them to work with you. The better you are or the more you know about the role to be filled, the better you can do all these things.

This is fairly obvious for the identification process. If you do not know the first thing about marketing, for example, you will not be able to tell which person can actually help when you are at the networking event full of social media experts who will all fill your ear with wondrous promises. Unless you are lucky, you will pick up someone worse than useless: someone who will drag you down.

It's only slightly less apparent for convincing them to join you. Past a certain point, monetary incentives lose effectiveness. Smart, good people want to work with people who understand their value, whom they respect, and who have some knowledge or experience to offer in return. The more you show capacity to understand the technical requirements of your project, the more comfortable a technical person will feel working with you. A good developer, for example, will often value the assurance that their concerns will be understood and considered more highly than the specifics of monetary incentives.

This is The Hiring Multiplier, and is one reason why a breadth of knowledge is so beneficial. Know the basics of as many areas of your business as you can, not so you can do them yourself, but so you can get the most out of the multiplier.