INTERVIEW: The Importance of Hiring the Right People

As consumer companies continue to expand their global presence, they face a host of formidable challenges: among them, staying close to the consumer, finding and attracting local talent, and managing an increasingly complex and far-flung organization. Adnan Lee of MBG Fruits talks about how hiring the right people help a business grow.

Q1. MBG started off as a fruit stall and grew to become a chain outlet with a presence not only in Malaysia but also globally. What helped you decide to start hiring full time staff?

For a business to grow, the key factor is people. Without people, a business will not able to grow and expand. 

Owning a fruit stall it can be managed by myself or families members. To transform a single business outlet to a chain of outlets, it needs a team. It started from hiring full time staff, followed by grooming them until they can run the business themselves. Eventually, the business will be run professionally. Beside operations staff at outlets, other professional full time staff that need to be hired include human resources, finance, marketing, business development, internal audit, purchaser and etc. 

Q2: What were the fears you faced when planning to hire and how did you overcome it?

To run a retail business, the greatest fear is hiring wrong people with a poor core values for our business. When a wrong people are hired, it not only affects productivity, it will also influence other staff. Thus MBG is a company that emphasizes three core values which are honesty, respect and determination. We will only hire people with these values, no matter how smart they are, if they are not equipped with these values, we will not select them.

The screen through process during the interview is important and the three month probation as a second policy helps to determine the good value staff in the organization. Staff with poor core values and discipline will not be confirmed. 

When staff our organization are equipped with high core values, with our training systems, we are able to develop them to become better performers.  

Q3: How do you ensure that your staff are kept motivated?

MBG has team building, it consists of three parts. Every MBG staff is required to go through the team building. It will motivate them and raise their self awareness. 

Beside this, we also encourage them to read books like "Stephen Covey's 7 habits of Highly Effective people" , we enforce this into our confirmation process. Superiors are required to train the 7 habits to their staff as well.

We also drive our staffs with monthly KPI incentives. Incentives will be paid out every month for outlet that achieve sales target. It is a reward system to reward them for their extra efforts when they deliver total customer satisfactions to our customers. MBG outlet's KPI is able to monitor daily, this daily monitoring will able to motivate staff to achieve maximum output.

Q4: What is your advice for startup entrepreneurs?

My advice is to learn the survival instinct. You have to learn to do this independently and not think that others will come and help take care of the bits and pieces. And don't waste time.

Start young and find an area to focus on, develop it and don't listen to other people telling you there are better opportunities elsewhere. Focus on your chosen area and establish yourself firmly. Equip yourself with high determination values, never give up for all failures and stand up quickly after learning the lesson. Eventually you will get there. 

Q5: On the topic of getting the team right, how do you recruit and retain the best

people—especially in markets where the MBG brand is not so well known?

We believe people with same core values, vision and mission always attract each other. 

MBG always state our core values, vision and mission clearly, we promote it every time we recruit new people. 

By emphasize above three items in our recruitment campaign, we found it able to attract talents that wish to have a long term employments. 

In year 2015, we documented our achievers company trip plan, team building, and recruitment video. MBG fully utilizes multimedia to attract our talents.

Join Adnan Lee at the Nurture Growth Conference on November 19th in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia as he discusses why you understand your company values before being able to hire the right people for your company. Make sure you get your tickets HERE.