Lots of business leaders have written on how they struggled and learnt how to hire winners for making their businesses grow. Harvey S. Firestone’s fine essay titled What I Have Learned about Men is one of my favourite.

Firestone wandered through a series of jobs, including that of a traveling medicine-extract salesman, before he founded his Ohio-based tire and rubber company in 1990. Goodyear and Goodrich were already well established in town and did not welcome the newcomer. The unwanted Firestone’s tire design excelled in an area that was a big issue of the day-keeping the rubber tire fastened to the rim. His big break finally came in 1906 when Henry Ford ordered 20,000 sets of tires, and the next year Firestone sold a total of 105,000 tires.

In What I have Learned about Men, he provides some unique ideas about interviewing prospective employees, his style of understanding what kind of family and social background is the person coming in from. His style of watching the body language and gestures to determine the nature of a person’s character. His method of understanding personality traits and attitude and reasoning ability of the person.

A recruiter and HR person can learn a lot from this essay. Click on the link below to read on.

What I Have Learned about Men by Harvey S. Firestone

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.