For 35 years, Jack Killion bought, sold, started from scratch, and merged companies in a range of sectors including equipment manufacturing, consumer and business-to-business publishing, industrial polymer processing, and agriculture. Today, he is the managing general partner of Eagle Rock Partners, which provides venture capital funding to emerging companies, and he is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Rothman Institute at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey.

NY REPORT asked Killion to tell us what he learned about putting together a crack team. He provides his top tips below.

Winning organizations are always on the alert to add another good person to the team. Even in the toughest of times, adding a top performer can make all the difference in the world. Smart companies never assume they are done recruiting so constantly be on the look out for a real difference-maker.

If you are lucky enough to find one, then find a way to bring her or him aboard. If you advertise for new people, use non-traditional approaches and ask for exactly what you are looking for. Your time is valuable. Don’t waste it by getting flooded with résumés from mediocre candidates with backgrounds that don’t fit your needs. Use advertising to scare away and discourage marginal candidates, as well as to identify a few special applicants.

One of the most productive ads I ever ran was for a three-shift, 400-person manufacturing company that sorely needed help in all capacities. So I ran an ad that read something like the following:

We Need Bright People

If you are: bright, motivated, educated, a difference-maker, able to get things done, work with minimum direction, enthusiastic, a thinker, able to juggle and multitask, communicate effectively, and lead then we would like to hear from you. We need exceptionally capable people in all parts of our company, so get back to us and tell us why you think you are a fit.

This ad drew more qualified responses than any other I have ever written. We hired two people from it and both remained with the company for years.

In other ads, I usually put in words like: 9-to-5’ers need not apply, need real sense of urgency, must have an impact, compensation tied to company’s and your results, must have passion for selling, may need to work some weekends.

Don’t hire someone even with obvious skills and talent if you think they really do not want to handle the job responsibilities you need to fill.

I find this is often the case when marketing people apply for sales positions and try to convince me they really want to be in sales. I have made this mistake many, many times. It never works out. Without exception they perform the sales role poorly while waiting for another marketing job to open up with some another organization. Make certain the person you hire wants to do the work you need to be done.

Use trial periods before making a commitment to an applicant.

No matter how much pre-hiring interviewing, testing, and background checking you do, I have found you can’t really tell if a person will work out with your organization until you start working together. I have used three-month trial periods many times. If you are not sure after three months, then the fit is likely to be a poor one over the long haul.

I often use the trial period to do more fact-checking on a candidate. In one case, I had hired a sales person for a publishing company I owned based on a recommendation from a friend of mine, who also happened to be the candidate’s sister-inlaw. Very quickly, it became apparent the applicant wasn’t going to work out. He often came in late and left early. His cigarette and lunch breaks stretched out. He was not making any real progress selling ad space. His excuses were many. I was at the point where I didn’t really believe anything he said. I started by checking his college background, fully expecting to learn that he never completed his degree at the college cited. Worse yet, with one phone call we found that he had never even registered at the college. He was gone that same day.

During trial periods, I usually pay the candidate as a freelancer and without benefits. To be fair, I also understand if they need to take some time off during the trial period to explore other career opportunities. In some cases, I have also suggested to an applicant that the trial period be an unpaid internship until we both get a better handle on the possible fit. This accomplishes two things: it shows me whether or not the applicant really wants to join us and has enough self confidence to take the risk of working for just the experience. It also enables me to “sell” the interim addition of the new person to the rest of the organization if the fit seems to be a reach.

Always look to add people with entrepreneurial instincts and abilities.

I have zero interest in working with people with a 9-to-5 mentality. I know you cannot build a really viable organization staffed primarily with 9-to-5’ers. Nor would those people be happy working with me.

Finding people with the entrepreneurial spirit is hard. It certainly isn’t taught in our school systems. And even the colleges with entrepreneurial studies programs do a poor job of developing entrepreneurial instincts and abilities, in my humble opinion.

To address this issue, I put more emphasis on recruiting younger people with their future still ahead of them and eager to learn and grow with prudent risk taking. Again, in general, I have had much more success recruiting and developing younger talent than I have had recruiting senior, more-established candidates already too set in their ways. The obvious downside to going younger is that it puts responsibility on you and your team to spend the time developing the new recruit.

One example of how this approach worked happened several years ago when I was asked to take over managing a family-owned business when the owner died. At the time, I was running two other publishing companies and couldn’t be at the manufacturing company 9-5, five or six days a week. I needed someone to back me up. I advertised for experienced candidates and quickly learned that recruiting an obviously strong candidate in our situation wasn’t going to happen. So, I reached out to a local college and asked who the brightest senior business student they had was. I then made contact and quickly recruited him to join us, despite being able to pay him less than 50 percent of what IBM was offering at the time.

The lure for the recent graduate was that I told him, if he joined us, he would learn how to start and own his own business, whereas a company like IBM would only teach him how to sell office systems. He stayed with us for 10 years before leaving to start his own similar, but not directly competitive, company with my help.

Young people aren’t always the only ones with entrepreneurial spirits. To detect a spark of entrepreneurship in a person, look at the kinds of jobs they held earlier in their lives. I like to bring in people who started working early, usually in high school. What do their parents do? Apples don’t fall far from the tree. Did they grow up in an entrepreneurial home environment? Have they traveled extensively? I think this really speaks volumes about a person’s sense of curiosity and willingness to venture outside their comfort zone. Do they read? I have vowed to never hire another person who claims they do not read. Reading just says so much about a person’s thirst for knowledge. Get input from others in your organization before adding a new person. I like to involve many others within my organization when I am recruiting new people. Assuming I did a good job adding these employees, they should have a good handle on the type of person and the skill set we need to add. Including them in the interviewing and decision-making process gives them an ownership stake in the success of the new people brought onto the team.

Jack Killion can be reached at jack@bluestonekillion.com.