DAVID VOLK, Esq.: Effective Hiring Gives Business Owners Entrepreneurial Edge

a bad hire can bring havoc to your business

Effective hiring, done right, is hard work. Your attitude towards hiring must demonstrate that it is important to you and that you will take the time to find the right person. It is easy to think you have a vacancy that must be filled immediately.

Instead, think of the havoc a bad hire can bring to your business. We have a great team at Volk Law Offices that I enjoy working with. I do not want to hire anyone who could disrupt our harmony and efficiency, so we are careful with talent selection. We also help employers address and manage toxic employees.

A bad hire can produce subpar work that requires significant effort to rectify, or worse. The bad hire can destroy customer relations. They can get you sued. They can cause your other employees to suffer if the new hire does not play well with the others. A gossip guy or other pot stirrer is toxic.

Toxics take oxygen out of the room. Toxics are a distraction. Toxics capture an excessive amount of your attention when you should be paying more grateful attention to your good people. You often put in immense effort to fix Toxic Tommy.

Here is the big, bad news: Toxic Tommy often thinks he is just fine the way he is. So, he will not make any effort to improve.

And, you run the risk of turning blue in the face trying to get him to shape up. For some bad hires, it is impossible for them to change. They may be borderline personalities or have narcissistic personality disorders.

Really bad eggs always blame others for their problems or simply deny they exist. They will push back on efforts to improve their performance because they are fine with the way they are. 

I am sure many owners and managers are nodding as they read this. You know. You have been there. Many times. So, what is the solution? Plan!

People do not plan to fail. They fail to plan. You need a plan to significantly reduce the chance of a bad hire. 

Step 1: Do not think in terms of urgently needing more help to fill a vacant position. Write a job description with as much detail as you can think of for what you need to new employee to do. Functions are first. 

Step 2: What attributes are the key characteristics you need to have? I will start you off in making your list based upon core value attributes I highly value. Volk Law Offices’ core values are highly aligned with Big Law’s Cleveland-based Jones Day. Jones Day is one of the firms I have always thought of as one of the best in the country, so I was thrilled when my office manager Nichole Stevens shared Jones Day core values with me as part of our process in articulating our core values.

Those Jones Day and Volk Law Offices’ core values include:

■ Integrity, both individually and institutionally, in dealings with our clients, the courts, our adversaries, and among ourselves;

■ A sense of personal accountability for every decision, judgment, and action on behalf of our clients or the Firm;

■ A level of competence which is marked by creativity and judgment that makes the quality and value of our services distinctive, and that our lawyers will enhance by continued professional growth;

■ A dedication to our clients’ interests and an intensity of effort which distinguishes our lawyers from others in the profession;

■ An independence which does not detract from dedication to the interests of our clients, but which always enables us to determine and to advise what is in the best interests of our clients;

■ An understanding of our clients that makes us more sensitive to their concerns, objectives, and discipline that makes us more responsive to their needs;

■ A determination to provide quality legal services to our clients with real efficiency and within an organization structured to facilitate, rather than to impede, the achievement of these objectives; and

■ Commitment to this Firm as a professional endeavor, composed of people who have the same professional values and aspirations, the most important of which are contained in these principles.

Thank you, Jones Day! You made it easy for me to think through what we value at Volk Law Offices and to get you started in creating your list. We had an office exercise where we reviewed that list and ranked them in order of importance for us. I will add a few more. Being a lifelong learner is indispensable to success in a business and real estate law firm with clients like ours who love problem-solving and good results.

The universe of commercial legal issues is extremely broad, and you have to love learning the nuances of the types of work we help clients with. The law constantly evolves; our people have to have the flexibility to evolve instead of having a know-it-all attitude.

For instance, the Florida Supreme Court made some significant changes to the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, effective January 1, 2025. We were well ahead of those changes by becoming well-versed in them before they took effect.

Step 3: Identify individuals who share your core values. Most applicants will tell you what they think you want to hear. Many will exaggerate or lie about their experience. The best practice is to gather as much information as possible about the person. I urge you to purchase and study “Topgrading” by Brad Smart. He works with both large and small companies. He asserts that if you follow his protocol, you can achieve 90 percent hiring success, compared to the 25 to 40 percent most companies typically achieve.

He has also recently written a quick summary book with Chris Mursau, Foolproof Hiring, which will win you over by first explaining why hiring is so hard. Then, he starts prescribing the medicine for you to achieve greater success. A sample question guide in Topgrading includes types of questions to determine intellectual characteristics, such as intelligence, analytical skills, judgment and decision-making, conceptual ability, creativity, strategic skills, pragmatism, risk-taking, leading-edge adaptation, education, experience, and track record. 

Wow, that sounds like an exceptionally long interview process. It is. And that is why it works so well. This helps you determine the type of person you are considering, rather than relying solely on a resume and mundane, run-of-the-mill questions that often yield unreliable answers. 

We also conduct reference checks and internet searches to uncover any unfavorable information about individuals. The Brad Smart “truth motivator” is a powerful referencing checking tool. You tell the candidate that you want to take to the next level of screening to provide three references and that they need to tell the references we will be in touch and that they should speak freely and truthfully about the candidate.

Great candidates like this process, because they know their references will speak very highly about them, but will also share any limiting factors. Everyone has those. Great candidates know what they are and strive to improve, which was impressive to the references. The great candidates will also tell you what they are working on to improve. 

You want to win the hiring adventure. You can and will if you make it important. Yet again, I could go on and on, but space is limited. If I’ve got you excited about learning more about how to win this hiring game, you’re on your way to greater success. The more you try to learn and the more you practice, the easier it gets. You are not filling the vacancy. You are creating a great culture with great people you like working with. 

A manager has to essentially be a magnificent psychologist because the manager will be selecting and developing good employees and trying to solve the problem of underperforming employees. The manager needs to keep good records. The manager has to develop procedures for managing the operations of the business.

This can be as simple as a procedure for how the telephone is answered or as complex as how to prepare a bid, how work is performed, what is needed for equipment and supplies, what professionals should be hired such as an accountant and lawyer, and disaster preparedness and recovery. Why a good lawyer? For example, you will inevitably have employee problems.

We have several client survival tools at Volk Law Offices, including a comprehensive set of human resources forms that guide onboarding and managing challenging personnel events. One example is a Noncompete, Trade Secrets, and Confidentiality Agreement, which helps prevent employee theft of valuable resources, such as customers and sensitive internal data, including financial information and operational processes.

When you understand the three hats you have to wear in business, it becomes much easier to understand why it is so hard to be a successful entrepreneur. A smart, motivated person can likely do a great job with one or maybe two of the three hats, but will not effectively do very well with all three.

So, what is this killing the hero business? It means realizing that you need help with the three hats, that you choose your help wisely, and that you train your help. Most important is that you trust your help so that you delegate often at a level higher than you were comfortable with, and that you are fully knowledgeable about what is going on in the business.

A cornerstone of being fully knowledgeable is defining your KPIs. KPIs are key performance indicators. The simplest are income and expenses in a set period of time. Objective reality is best evaluated by hard data points, such as profitability. You do not want to be the business owner that says, ‘we are losing money on each job, but I think we can make it up with volume.’ I wish I had more space. In future articles, I will come back with more Entrepreneurial Edge advice. As a business owner celebrating thirty years of surviving and thriving, it is enjoyable helping people grow their businesses with fewer growing pains.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David J. Volk, Esq., has conducted approximately 85 trials and more than 800 hearings as sole or lead counsel. Foundational principles such as faith, recognizing the need for mentors, humility, and never giving up is what has led Volk throughout his life and career as a lawyer and business owner.

He has a background of working in family-owned businesses, and this has been helpful in understanding how businesses are run. At the age of twelve, he went to work in his parents’ beverage warehouse with tasks such as sweeping floors, loading, unloading, and cleaning trucks, working in the icehouse, forklift operation, and checking in drivers receipts and money. He continued to stay active in the family business affairs up through graduating law school.

Other activities included helping with leasing, cleaning, and bookkeeping for commercial and residential rental properties; surface coal mining, including operating and servicing trucks and machinery; the sale, delivery, installation, and servicing of manufactured homes; and the construction of a mobile home park and commercial building.

Bar Admissions and Education

Florida Bar, West Virginia Bar, all Florida Federal District Courts, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Supreme Court. Former partner in what was Brevard County’s largest firm Reinman, Harrell, Graham, Mitchell & Wattwood, P.A. and established Volk Law Offices, P.A. in December of 1994. West Virginia University Bachelor of Science degree in business administration (accounting major) 1983 and juris doctor degree from that school’s College of Law 1987. Member: Moot Court Board and Lugar Trial Association. Legal research and writing teaching assistant while in law school. 

For more information, visit VolkLawOffices.com or call 321-726-8338.

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