Thomas Edison famously uttered this gem: “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” So with that in mind, we’ll respectfully hear from John Doe (not his real name). Doe owns a small sound company and was trying to develop good people. One gent, an ex-Navy man who certainly looked good on paper, was hired as a monitor mixer.

“In one instance, the band asked for more bass in the monitors, and he said, ‘No, it’s loud enough,’” Doe laments. “When the band argued with him, he got mad and turned all their monitors off.” Doe, working FOH, was not aware of this until it was too late. After that gig, this important, influential band told Doe that they would never work with him again, and the damage was done.

“I lost that client for good. In this market, if a client doesn’t like you, you won’t get another shot at it.”

That was the most egregious example, but a string of bad hiring choices and training missteps damaged his struggling company’s reputation. Doe is crystal clear on what he will and will not do from now on. “I will not hire teenagers, period,” Doe says. “I won’t train them, I won’t have anything to do with them. They carry way too much baggage.” Also, his bad experiences taught him to not hire anyone who is not a musician on some level.

Doe also advocates non-paid internships. “There is a tremendous amount of training that goes into making a new hire useful,” he points out. “I give classes on signal flow, on everything.” So if people want the job badly enough to work in exchange for some training, he feels it’s fair for them and good for him.

And Doe’s not necessarily impressed with recording school grads, or anyone from a college program. His experience is that “those kids come out with attitudes” and often lack real world experience.

With a full-time staff of eight key players, and a payroll that can get as high as 20, Bill Robison and Todd Mitchell don’t underestimate the importance of their people.

“I am very successful at this business only because of the people working with us,” Robison, president of Great Lakes Sound, says. “I could have an inventory of equipment as big as a company like Fourth Phase, but without quality people, we’re nothing.”

When asked about his hiring and training philosophy, Robison merely points across the conference table to Mitchell. A decade earlier, Mitchell was just a grunt in the back of his shop, but today he’s vice president and “running the company.”

“We’re not a large corporation, so our process is important,” Mitchell says. Their interview process has traditional elements (“I won’t talk to anyone without a resumé—you need to put forth an effort,” Robison says). But appropriately, a key component is a field test. Once the resumé gets enough notice for an office interview, and if that goes well, the applicant gets invited to work a show or two to see what Great Lakes is about—and vice versa. “I wouldn’t call it a hazing process, but it’s a chance to put him or her next to the guys who have been doing it a long time. We very rarely hire anyone on a full-time basis without first getting his or her feet wet on a job site,” Robison continues.

But Great Lakes will pay them for this part of the “interview.” Not only for liability reasons (you don’t want an unpaid worker getting hurt on your job), but also so the company people are comfortable ordering them around.

And what do they look for when applicants are on site? “We look to see if they have been ‘bitten by the bug,’” Robison says. “If you don’t love this line of work, you’ll get out quickly.”

“And when they realize how hard it is, that it’s not eight hours and they are out, that it’s often a 12- or 16-hour day,” and they are still thrilled and excited about it, then they are likely very good candidates, Mitchell adds.

Robison and Mitchell echo what many successful companies in this business have said: it’s better to get someone younger, with less experience and training, than someone from a fancy-pants school who has developed attitude and “bad habits.” They would rather teach someone their way of doing things. Also, Robison points out that these days, the same guy who drives a board for the latest up and coming rock act on Saturday needs to be able to handle a corporate gig on Tuesday and a politician’s rally on Thursday.

Mitchell acknowledges that the Toledo area, where they are based, is a smaller market labor-wise, but that they have had good success grooming individuals who do the local bars but are hungry for more work. Once they find a talented individual, “we try to keep him on the payroll as much as possible and as much as we can afford,” in the hopes of that person sticking around and growing with the company.

If they do like someone, they will do a conventional background check, and likely call some references on the resumé. Other experts in and out of this field would say to go deeper than that, but Robison is confident of his ability to read people.

Some companies might want to look to local colleges with theatre programs for non-paid internships, where a student will work for you for a semester and a grade, but internships have their pros and cons too. When they work, they are marvelous, but it’s not uncommon for anyone who has done this in any field to conclude that it’s more trouble than it’s worth: interns can end up causing you to do more work than less.

”Trial by fire,” Robison says. “School of Hard Knocks,” Mitchell says. At Great Lakes, the new hire is put in the “den of lions” and learns by going out with the older guys. The two feel that they really learn that way, and that it is the best way.

But what about the increasing complexity of the technology in use today? “First of all, this industry is too equipment driven,” Mitchell maintains. “The manufacturers suggest we have to have the latest on the market all the time, and that’s not essentially true.” But at the same time, kids joining the business are coming with a much greater knowledge of computers and the digital world to begin with. “Kids are learning to program lighting controllers on the Internet, and theatre students know how to use the latest and greatest computer programs, but they can’t even tell you Ohm’s Law. They can’t even tell you how many amps a PAR can draws!” So the training process for them is in the field, where the new hire will learn the basics of how electricity flows and the correct way to wire an amplifier. “Digital or analog, the basic theory still applies.”

Mitchell adds that in his early days of training, he wasn’t allowed to operate a board for years. He soldered, assembled FOH racks, etc. And he’s not arguing about the results: “Now I’m vice president, and it’s because I took the time to learn the basics.”

Their training period is as varied as the people they hire. “It depends on how we read you,” Robison says. “For some people, it’s much more intuitive than others. “Our big problem is that kids are educated in recording, and it’s a completely different science than live event sound. In the studio, you have total control. In a live situation, you have modest control.”

Robison’s test of when a flunkie is ready for the big time is simple: “When they know what to plug in, where to plug it in, and why it’s plugged in,” he says, “then they have shown they understand the flow of the signal.”