The Welsh Wire: Sue Tellier, JetCo Solutions

When you’re a small business that relies on highly skilled but highly specialized workers, you need to craft a very thoughtful interview procedure to make sure you can recruit the talent you need.

“Our methodology for interviews has nothing to do with gotchas’, we have no gotcha’ questions,” says Sue Tellier, owner of JetCo Solutions in Grand Rapids, a company that provides services to help small firms win government contracts. “We’re genuinely trying to find out if someone is going to be a good long term fit for us.”

Tellier says in their interviews they try to over communicate the essence of their company culture, which includes projecting calm to their customers in the face of tight deadlines. Therefore, they ask questions to try and identify candidates who won’t panic and weed out people who have a history of workplace drama.

“(JetCo) is small enough that every hire can affect our culture, and so we’re very conscious of making sure that we still have the same drama-free, hard working, have fun, no-whining culture that we’ve worked really hard to build,” she says.

Listen to Sheri’s entire interview with Sue Tellier

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