A method to make sure I hired the “right person” is something I wanted desperately in the early years of my small business. I would have given anything to avoid the painful mistakes I was making. Since I could find nothing to help me, I developed my own system, out of desperation, to try to increase my chances of hiring people who would be right for me and my company.
I started my marketing communications firm 26 years ago, and almost immediately, it started growing fast. I was overwhelmed by the amount of work I had to do, and referrals were coming in all the time. I knew that if I wanted to keep my company growing and live up to the promises I’d made to clients, I had to get help. So I just started hiring.
I was lucky with some hires and extremely unlucky with others. I had some great team members, and others who embarrassed me in front of my clients, stole from me, wasted my time, and “poisoned the well” of my good, existing team. I spent a great deal of time fixing their mistakes and trying to understand them, to mold them into the type of people I needed. Or I’d find a way to let them go and start over with a new person — who sometimes had a new and different problem. I was constantly frustrated, and not able to get to my own work of growing the business.
Here’s the most important thing:
What I didn’t realize then was that I hadn’t taken the time to hire correctly in the first place — I should never have hired many of these people!
Once I figured this out, I got serious about why and how I was hiring people. I read all I could about it (which wasn’t much — most of the team building information is geared towards big business and is written from an HR perspective, and I needed something that understood me, as a small business owner!), I talked to everyone who could help me, and I thought carefully about what was going wrong with the the way I was doing it. And then I started to try things, to do things differently when I hired. And slowly I developed my own system, which allowed me to get out of the ongoing cycle of managing people and fixing mistakes and back to what I’d started my business for in the first place.
I found that hiring really included 3 major areas:
1. the conversations with candidates
2. the interview logistics, and
3. protecting myself and my business
And so I developed a series of conversations, interview logistics, and methods for protecting my company. I learned what to watch for in candidate reactions — what they said, and what they didn’t say. I created a series of checklists, grading sheets, and contracts. And it started to work overwhelmingly well for me. I started to get more of the right people on my bus.
It worked so well that my team started to sync with me, because I was only hiring people who shared the same values, philosophies, and work ethics. They began to roll up their sleeves beside me in the business, and before long, they managed many of the day-to-day aspects of the company without me. My business continued to increase in revenue while I decreased my direct involvement, enabling me to focus on my strengths and other business building activities. At the same time, my team was taking off — growing into their capabilities, gaining confidence and leadership skills.
So that you can hear, straight from me, a bit more about how these strategies work, I’ve created a short, 18-minute audio, and I’d love to have you check it out. Download the free recording, “Hiring the Right Person: 8 Proven Strategies You Need to Know Before Your Next Hire,” below.
If you’re building a team, these strategies are must-haves.
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