Best practices: Ideal Homes

Hiring Practices and Profit Sharing Plan

Ideal founders and management believe the key to building a superior company lies in recruiting and retaining exceptional personnel. Ideal customized its own extensive interviewing and hiring processes based on the book Topgrading by Bradford Smart (Prentice Hall, 1999). Ideal's practices includes:

• pre-screening phone interviews with all candidates
• work history interviews, often two to three hours in length
• detailed reference checks of each potential candidate
• once candidates are pared to a leading few, they participate in individual one-hour interviews with each of four company executives
• executives then meet to made a group decision on the best candidate for the job

After six months of employment, every employee participates in Ideal's profit sharing plan at the same rate. Funds are paid each quarter based on two qualifying factors:

1. net profits of five percent or more
2. customer satisfaction surveys, conducted quarterly, must meet the company's yearly benchmark.