MICHAEL GREECE:(Voiceover) I think the biggest challenge for any small or mid-sized business is growing the business, and the most crucial element in growing a business is finding and hiring the right people. We probably are emblematic of a lot of middle-sized businesses, where growth can come very quickly, and so we have to find people very quickly. Now, our experience is that there’s a very finite group of people who are going to be a good match for our company and our client base. That one or two people that you have to add is going to make a much bigger impact on 15 or 50 people than 1,500 or 15,000.

SCOTT BERWITZ: Something I noticed that Mike does is he makes sure that the people he brings in here embody at least some of the main ideals of the office. In a smaller firm I think it could be almost more damaging to the group dynamic if you get one person in who just doesn’t really fit because there’s less people to counteract it. If you’re in a firm of 700 people, nobody would even notice really.

MICHAEL GREECE: When the bell goes off and we have to hire someone quickly, generally that’s a very dangerous time. One of the things we’ve tried which has been extremely effective when we’ve had the time, is to test drive that person, in other words, bring the person on in a temporary way for a few weeks and let them get to experience us, and let us get to experience them, sort of like an intensive speed dating.

RACHEL SHULMAN: It was a positive experience because I got to, you know, work with the people I’d be working with eventually, as opposed to kind of just, you know, when you start a job you have no idea what the people are going to be like, what the accounts are going to be like.

MICHAEL GREECE: The gut is a very important barometer in making a hiring decision. We had a referral on a candidate who had never been in a PR firm, and who wanted to change careers, but we met and I detected in this person, first of all, a tremendous amount of energy, a desire to learn our business, and a keen intellect.

TONY BERLIN: We kind of worked around the issue that I came from another industry, so I was in a certain, in a level of experience, and that kind of thing, and so that was kind of a challenge, as a non-traditional hire, coming in from not really a PR background, but I have a lot of the skills that are used in public relations.

MICHEAL GREECE: One of the things we try to do is we try to get as many people in our family to meet the candidate as possible and we come up with a family decision. And when they come out of those meetings I get feedback from everyone, and I don’t ask them what they thought of their resume, I don’t ask them what they thought of the answers of the candidate, I ask them one question, “Did you like them?” I think the notion of your existing staff, in a small to mid-sized business, liking and feeling comfortable with a person is as important as having an Ivy League degree.

It’s crucial in a small middle-sized or middle-sized business to realize that you’re not going to get anybody perfect, and I think part of the things we look for is that agility of intellect and that ability to learn and to morph oneself, and to fit into the assignment, if you will, that we’re going to give that person, and the skill sets that are going to be required, I think can be learned. The competition for talent is extraordinarily intense, and hiring the right people means not only finding the people who are intrinsically talented but people who are also, will have a passion about our firm and about our client’s businesses, and that’s perhaps the most difficult thing. I can find people who on paper look qualified, but what I really need to find is people who will share our passion for success and passion for excellence.