During the mesh conference last week, it was exciting to be the emcee for 15 Minutes of Fame – where three entrepreneurs each day get five minutes to talk about what their startups are doing and why they’ll be successful.

With only five minutes to present, their focus was spent on the product/service they were developing. If they had more time, I suspect it would they all would have talked about the importance of building good teams and hiring the right people. As Wufoo.com’s Kevin Hale succinctly said during his presentation at meshU, “if you have a bad team, you’ll have a bad product”.

What makes the hiring landscape interesting – particularly in Toronto and perhaps elsewhere – is the strong demand for talent. At mesh, we installed three blank whiteboard with four words on them “Jobs Needed” and “Jobs Wanted”. By the end of mesh, all three whiteboards were full of companies looking for people.

The need for people is just one half of the hiring equation. It’s easy to ask, the more difficult part is making sure you actually hire the right people. This is where it gets challenging and complicated, particularly for start-ups that need to hire the right person at the right time if they want to be successful.

The challenge is how you do it. The most common way is you advertise a position or ask friends and colleagues for referrals. The resumes flow in, you pick the ones that look interesting, and arrange for interviews. Then, you interview candidates maybe once or twice for an hour before you making a hiring decision.

Think about it: you’ve got a key position to fill, and you’ve maybe invested three hours from start to finish. If you’re lucky or have a knack for finding the right people, the person you hire really works out or works out well enough so your company can move forward.

But is there there a better and/or smarter way to hire people? Are there ways that you can improve your chances of hiring the right person? Is it just a matter of doing more interviews so you’re really comfortable before pulling the trigger? Or are there other ways?

A friend of mine, Ben Baldwin, may have another way. He runs a company called Careerious, which recently launched a new online job matching service that uses personality, experience and education to help predict hiring success. It’s a fascinating process that I’ll get into with Ben in the near future but it is definitely worth checking out if you want more than just the same-old, same-old hiring process.

The inspiration for this post is a speech given recently by New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, who talked about the disconnect in the hiring process. His thesis is that the hiring criteria for many positions is disconnected with the actual skills needed to do a particular job well. He talks about, for example, why policemen are hired because they are big and burly when the skills they really need do not necessarily requirement brute force but negotiating and diplomatic skills.

It’s great food for thought given the importance of making the right hires. While hiring can never become a science with precise and expected results, there are tools and techniques out there to improve the chances of a successful hire – something all companies, especially start-ups, should think more about.