People ask me all the time how to find the right personnel for their business, start-up and established alike. My first response to them is always, “Do you have your entire business reasonably planned out to the point where you know exactly what types of resources you are ideally going to need to succeed – with a front to back, top to bottom infrastructure-based business model – with detailed descriptions of the positions you wish to fill?”

If the person in search of the right people responds with “I am as planned as a business owner can be,” then, I ask that person, “Is your business a short-term, highly-mobile, low-investment, quick-profit operation . . . or a long-term, sustained enterprise with scalable product types?”

If the person with the rock-solid business plan responds with “I am in it for the long-haul,” then, I ask that person, “Are you prepared to pay a reasonable premium - potentially in salary, review-based increases and promotions, bonuses, benefits, and continuing education - towards procuring the right people and keeping them onboard in support of your long-term corporate goals?”

If the person who has planned for a long-term enterprise responds with “I am prepared to make the right investment in the right people,” then, I ask that person, “Are you confident enough in the job descriptions you have created to hand them off to a talent acquisition agency for the initial vetting process?”

If the person who is prepared to make the right investment in his future employees responds with “The job descriptions I have prepared simply could not be more in-depth for either a talent evaluator or a job seeker,” then, I ask that person, “Do you have a short list of recommended talent scouts?”

If the person who has prepared near-perfect job descriptions to share with a recruitment firm responds with “I know exactly which talent acquisition firm I am going to retain,” then, I ask that person, “Have you established job descriptions for contingency positions in the event that your talent search comes up short, forcing you to address one or more positions with multiple resources, rather than going with a 1:1 ratio?”

If the person who is ready to partner with a specific recruiting agency responds with “Yes, in the event that I cannot find absolute perfection, I am prepared to pursue a well-balanced mix of candidates, who are ideal and / or have excellent growth potential, to meet my staffing requirements,” then, I tell that person, “You have performed a reasonable amount of the due diligence necessary to welcome the right people to your business. Your next step involves more patience than you may have ever displayed, while you wait for your recruitment agency to deliver multiple rounds of thoroughly vetted candidates for your deep consideration.  You may never find or have the perfect set of resources, but you have given yourself much better odds of success through planning.”

Every business, well-planned or poorly-conceived, has a wide variety of external forces with which it must also do battle, the most damaging of which can be patience . . . of the business owner.

The personnel, products, and services of a business can never truly achieve their full brilliance and maturity – in quality, effectiveness, growth, and profit – without the steady hand of a business owner who is willing to run a paced marathon before accelerating towards a sometimes necessary sprint finish.

A business owner, however, can only be as patient as what is allowed by other conspiring external forces, such as available funding, product delivery commitments, ever-changing market conditions, and even available personnel. The larger a business becomes, the more of these external ingredients are added to the witch’s brew, and the greater the chance of setbacks or complete failure. Even independently wealthy business owners have their limits.

Everyone, at some point or another, has dreams of being their own boss or even running a company involving multiple employees. Owning a business is as much about responsibility – to yourself, to your investors, to your personnel, to your products, and to your business – as it is about making a life-long dream come true. Some people do not have the intestinal fortitude or big picture interest to properly establish, manage, and maintain the components necessary to make their businesses attractive to either future investors or top-flight employment candidates.

The world is not perfect, and, in this vein, finding the right personnel for your business should never be viewed as mundane. Finding the right people should be as important as the air that you breathe. Your business dream – for a start-up or as part of an established company – may very well change your life forever, and it is your sole responsibility (unless you are a co-owner who will share in this burden) to build a proper foundation with all the right ingredients before you bring in the right people to pour the mold.

Finding the right people is about equal parts finding talent and finding professionalism. You can stumble upon the King of Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwiches, and you can be completely amazed by his ability to whip up the most delicious sandwiches with the crusts cut off the bread as well. Objectively, if he is not professional with clients, nor a team player with colleagues, nor someone who cares about "the craft" as much or more than "the paycheck," then he is not an appropriate fit for your business. Alternatively, as there is no law against hiring on personality alone, you may wish to hire a cut-throat person who may trample your personnel in order to achieve personal glory.

The current White House administration created what some have called a ridiculous 77-question survey as part of a greater vetting process for all of their personnel, and even with the intense scrutiny applied to each of their high profile candidates, their interview process has apparently not been intense enough.  There is no such thing as a background check that is too in-depth for a business around which you have built your dreams, and you may never field the perfect team of resources.  When it comes to the long-term health of your business, however, you can never get too close to perfection, either.

While some business owners are fixated on how perfectly matched their chosen candidates may be with their corporate goals, other business owners are petrified of making hiring blunders.  We are only human, and we all make mistakes, but how will you know if you have hired the right people?  What if the resumes, CVs, and transcripts you have received have all been falsified?  What if all of your close colleagues and candidate references, who have recommended marvelous personnel, are all part of an elaborate conspiracy to tear down your corporate empire?  If you have exhausted your best research methods and utilized all of the resources at your disposal (receiving input from industry colleagues and talent scouts, and even performing background checks on candidate references), and you still cannot find any dirty candidate laundry, then, you should roll the dice and hire them.

Hiring, after all, is a crap shoot on many levels. Consider that Warren Buffet can recommend his top lieutenant to you as the very best employee he ever hired. Few established business people would argue with such an endorsement, however, the same success may prove unattainable unless you are able to replicate the same working conditions, dynamics, and resources as Mr. Buffet.  Your business practices may not always be so similar to the business owners with whom you identify, which is why you truly are "comparing notes" when researching how to hire the right personnel.  You ultimately must work together with a candidate as employer and employee, as co-workers and colleagues, directly and indirectly, to really find out what you have in each other.

Nonetheless, you may have emphatically answered all of my questions with a combination of "no, here today gone tomorrow, not on your life, no way, none, and never."  Your business operation may be lean, mean, and extremely mobile with simple and inexpensive but popular products consumers love.  Your business model may only require small elements of the long-term engagement described here.  You may have an even more extreme perspective, preferring organized chaos or just plain Armageddon in your approach to business, products, and the right people who make the big wheel spin ‘round and ‘round.

While it may be the moral and professional obligation of business owners to hire employees of good character and skills, it is your God-given right to hire whomever you choose to support whatever approach you wish to take with your business.  It is often said, in the land of the free and the home of the brave, that “it is a free country.” And for those people who would make this statement to me – in the midst of one of the worst global economic crises in history, with so many moving parts to juggle in businesses large and small – I would ask you all, “How dangerously do you want to live?”