Whether your company produces cars or cosmetics, hiring great people for a business is always the most important task.  After all a company is only as good as the people it keeps, and as a Recruiting & HR professional you have this responsibility on your shoulders.

With that in mind here are 17 insightful hiring quotes to inspire you to build great teams and help you make better hiring decisions –

1. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

– Jim Collins, Good to Great

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2. “Human Resources isn’t a thing we do. It’s the thing that runs our business.”

– Steve Wynn, Wynn Las Vegas

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3. “You need to have a collaborative hiring process.”

– Steve Jobs, Apple

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4. “You can’t teach employees to smile. They have to smile before you hire them.”

– Arte Nathan, Wynn Las Vegas

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5. “Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.”

– Malcolm Forbes, Forbes

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6. “When hiring key employees, there are only two qualities to look for: judgement and taste. Almost everything else can be bought by the yard.”

– John W. Gardner

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7. “Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”

– Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM

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8. “It’s more than just selling pizzas. It’s being a good fit for the community. We hire based on the betterment of the community as much as anything.”

– Mark Starr, David’s Pizza.

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9. “You can have the best strategy and the best building in the world, but if you don’t have the hearts and minds of the people who work with you, none of it comes to life.”

– Renee West, Luxor and Excalibur Hotel

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10. “I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.”

– Lawrence Bossidy, GE

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11. “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for the love of it.”

– Henry David Thoreau, Life without Principle

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12. “If you think hiring professionals is expensive, try hiring amateurs”

– Anonymous

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13. “The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.”

– Bill Gates, Microsoft

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14. “Time spent on hiring is time well spent.”

– Robert Half

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15. “I hire people brighter than me and then I get out of their way”

– Lee Iacocca, ford 

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16. “You cannot push anyone up the ladder unless he is willing to climb.”

– Andrew Carnegie

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17. “Management is nothing more than motivating other people.”

– Lee Iacocca, ford 

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What’s your favorite quote? What are some other good hiring quotes you know of? Let us know in the comments below!