Why Home in on Hiring Small Corp Employees
It is amazing to me that Human Resource departments favor those with Fortune 500 experience. And I am not talking about the fact that these employees are used to wasting endless hours on meetings, compliance exercises, videos, and reports designed to justify their very existence.
The biggest reason why large company employees are obsolete, is because most of them are conditioned to miss the forest from the trees. They are given segments of tasks, the context of the product is missing, and egos are simply thrown in to compete for attention. Everyone is too afraid to work with speed because the smallest typo will result in a negative evaluation.
Let me give an example. I have worked for both large and small companies. In the small company, I wrote the marketing plan, and I participated in the pricing, product and positioning discussion. I designed the questionnaire to make sure proper market research was conducted before proceeding and went full speed ahead. Every letter, every ad, every communication went through me. I knew and understood the market. Every expectation was in place. I anticipated the challenges and the satisfaction of every segment, and so we had the opportunity to be proactive. The biggest advantage? There was speed and fast eats slow. Decisive planning, market research, compliance, execution, followup superb client care… all of these enable great, long-lasting relationships.
Here is what happens at a large firm even when you are responsible for the full cycle of production, software launch, etc. Meetings, teams, reports, more meetings, templates, compliance, one edit, second edit, third edit, forth edit, compliance again, waiting period, corrections, then the edits start again. And all of this to correct a template that is for internal use only. No one, not managers, directors or partners even see the big picture. They will argue they are super fast and efficient. And they really do work hard, just not smart.
Please don’t get me wrong — compliance and regulation requirements must be checked, double checked and triple checked. They should not be overlooked. It’s all the egos in the pot, it’s the teams competing for project money, it’s the visibility everyone wants, and the meaningless time wasting. Politics. Bad culture. Not to mention, each employee has minuscule knowledge.
A marketing professional in a smaller firm knows the strategy, the direction, the software, how to make the ads, how to produce videos, how to create a website, how to make brochures, where to order them, how to buy the ads, and who to hire. The knowledge acquired there vastly supersedes the narrow set of skills a large firm requires. There isn’t even a comparison. A small firm hire is eager to take a product to completion even if corrections must continue to take place along the way. That’s not carelessness, it’s dynamism.
We have no time to waste in the global economy we are participating in. Let me give you another example. I was recently hired to lead a website development project. I researched the objectives, gave recommendations, came up with the needed pages and wrote the content. I submitted it, so that it is transferred into the proper format prior to launch. We are one week away from being finished.
Enter new hire — a Marketing Director, with multinational experience. He/she decides to add things. This director hires a second firm to help with the additions. Thousands of extra dollars requested. No market research is done, so that the client can see if the bells and whistles are even needed by the end users. Now, 18 month later, the project is still not completed. Moreover, the bells and whistles are functionally obsolete. Huge amount of money wasted. True beneficial add-ons (these were supposed to be stage II projects) omitted. Budget? Spent.
That is not to say that all large firm hires are incompetent. The exceptions to the rule, prove the rule, but this is not an anomaly, folks. This is what happens when you hire a big wig, whose entire training and experience are based on bureaucracy. Want a job well done? Hire a well-rounded, hard working professional that comes from a smaller firm. Keep your eye on the prize.