Your Team Will Get Your Business Through The Pandemic

Jack Ma said “Hire the right people, not the best people”, he must mean to hire the right person for the job and not necessarily one that graduated with most honors in college but is not fit for the job description. While some might think of Jack Ma as an enigma, I still believe this is what he meant or at least that’s what I think he meant.

Which led me to ask myself, why can’t you have both? or can you even have both? As I was doing a reevaluation of my team members since the pandemic has crippled our business. I realized that I am surrounded by highly decorated team members during their college years. 90% are Dean’s listers, to begin with, and the other 10% have been given special awards during their college years. These facts, I tend to have overlooked during the hiring process because I was more focused on what they can do, remember, hire the right person.

The myth of the right person for a startup

If you are running a million-dollar or billion-dollar company, then you might be attracting the right person who already has years of experience in the job that you require. However, if you are a startup, you are already strapped for cash so hiring the right person might be next to impossible. However, that doesn’t mean you cannot mold one to be the right person for the job. I hired fresh Mass Communications graduates whose impressive records I may have overlooked during the hiring process, but their willingness to learn is quite impressive. Molding a person to be the right person for the job is your role as a leader, but you will not be successful if, the desire to learn and execute what has been learned isn’t there, it is a two-way street.

So how did we find our right people? Our startup was swamped with projects and we needed new team members badly but after interviewing about 20 applicants we ended up with no new team member. We were already inclined to hire someone not fit for the job, just to have at least a little bit of help to accomplish our deliverables. However, another quote reminded me and it came from Google (not the search result, but the company) in the book How Google Works, they mentioned to “never sacrifice quality for urgency”. Yes, our need for team members was urgent, but because of this quote, we decided to wait and continuously advertised our career opportunity in the company, and one day, they arrived.

Getting You Through The Pandemic

Our business is focused on digital and content marketing, most of our clients are in the tourism industry. When the pandemic arrived in our City, there is no choice but to close, because most of our clients are in the tourism industry and all of them had asked the temporary suspension of our contracts. This is really understandable since the tourism industry is hardest hit by the pandemic. However, we cannot sit idly by and wait for a miracle to happen, for some time now we have been contemplating on evolving our website to be more than just a directory for hotels and businesses in our city. We wanted to deliver information to the people wherever they are, and while we were still testing this concept of integrating news on our website during the first quarter of this year, the Pandemic forced our hand and it forced us to evolve. But our evolution wouldn’t have happened if we do not have a highly skilled IT person that will deploy all the necessary changes in our website. And hiring four Mass Communication graduates where one is even a Magna cum laude came in handy, some might call it lucky but I say it is Divine Providence. No one could have foreseen the scale of this pandemic several years back.

The skill sets, their college background, and their training in startup culture are all the ingredients we needed to evolve our product from tourism centered to information centered one. While we are learning something new in this business every day, our foundation, my team members’ foundation are strong enough to deliver content beyond the minimum standard. Their adeptness in the use of technology also came very handily.

For a startup finding the right team members is going to be a challenge, especially if the product rests in the output of the team. As a leader, your role is not to command but to lead by example and mold your team members into people who will work with you to get the entire company through any crisis.

So is Jack Ma right when he said to hire the right people and not the best people? Yes, but if you hire the right people you will also discover they are the best people, and I am glad we hired the right people.