How To Hire Employees: Start With What The Position Needs

Hiring The Right Person For Your Business Needs

Hiring the right person for a position can seem to cause small businesses unnecessary stress because they are doing it without a plan. With all of the other hats you wear, now you have to put an ad in somewhere to get resumes. Then you have to comb through the resumes to see who you want to interview. You schedule the interviews during the day, which interrupts your routine, and maybe half of them show up. Once you have decided on the candidate to hire, a few weeks in, they don’t work out, and you have to start all over from the beginning. Arrg, this almost makes you want to keep an employee around that you know you should terminate. There may not be a magic wand that will give the best practices for hiring employees, but there is a structure to follow. Don’t despair, there is hope.

Working with small businesses over the past few years, they all seem to dread when they need to hire a new person for a role. It is because there is so much time and cost associated with finding a person, and if we aren’t being strategic in our approach, the person probably won’t stay around for long. When working with a business that needs to hire for a position, the first thing we look at is the job description of the role. Is there one? If not, this is a really good indication that we haven’t invested any time into understanding what this role needs to accomplish to be successful, and there is no way we are going to find the ideal candidate.  The job description needs to cover at least the main objectives of the role that we are trying to fill, and once it is complete, it can be used almost perfectly as the ad posting. As you are looking at the job description, make sure the responsibilities make sense for the role and are not just tasks that have been added in over the years because “that’s how we have always done it, Alan.” I once helped a company that was looking for an accountant, but one of their tasks was to clean the employee bathrooms each week. The company lost out on many good accountants that were never going to answer that posting, and when I asked the owner why it was on there, he told me that his last accountant, who was his wife, did it. Read the job description through the eyes of your potential candidates and try to imagine what they think when reading it.

Understanding what type of person we want in this role is the next step before we even begin holding interviews. When we think about who would make a rockstar employee in this role, what type of skills would they have, what type of traits, and what is their personality like? Yes, those all have a huge impact on the success of your potential candidate. For an accountant, I want someone who is incredibly detail-oriented, loves numbers, someone with an analytical mindset that will keep me out of trouble. For an outside salesperson, well, I want something different.

I was helping a small business in Minnesota find its next outside salesperson. They had a plethora of resumes to scan through and were discouraged from hiring someone who might not last. They showed me the top three candidates they were considering and I didn’t have the same hope for any of the three candidates. I asked the owners what type of tasks this person would do. They listed off items such as walking into the door of businesses and asking for a meeting, they spoke about this position getting on the phone and acting like they were best friends with a client they may never have met previously. Once they came up with a handful of daily tasks, I asked what type of personality would be good for this position. Both owners said that the ideal person loves people and new interactions, is an extrovert, and is very friendly, all while having amazing phone etiquette. I agreed with the owners and then we looked at the three ‘top candidates’ that they had previously pulled to the side. Although we could only see what was on paper, the positions previously held by their candidates did not seem to line up with what we were looking for. One of the candidates was a prison guard for twenty years before applying to this role; the owners liked that they were stable. Another candidate was a retired school teacher, whom the owners liked because she probably liked to teach. The third candidate was an employee of a competitor who is used to the machines they worked on; the owners liked this person because the candidate had some background knowledge of what we did. None of these candidates seems to have spent years in positions where they were using their extroverted skills, which is what we needed. Not to say that these candidates wouldn’t be able to do the job; however, we want to stack the deck with the best possible candidate on the first try. We settled on a few to interview, one being a past car salesman. After the interviews were conducted, the owners quickly agreed that the charisma of the salesman was exactly what they needed for this position. “If he talks to our clients in the same way that he spoke with us in the interview, we are going to need a bigger building,” one of the owners said immediately after the interview.

The last step in ensuring the success of your hard work in finding the right candidate is not to make the new employee feel lost when they start working for you. Have a plan and make sure the employee knows it. Before their first day, line out who is teaching them, what they will be learning, when they should have certain things learned by, and when you expect them to do each step. If your answer is, which I have heard far too often, ‘on-the-job-training,’ then we are just being lazy, and our new employee is not going to feel very welcome. Invest in creating a plan for your employee to train from which will help ensure their success.

Hiring the right person for your role is not just luck; it is strategic planning and having a mindset that wants the success of the employee. If you don’t consider who you are going to put in the role, and how you are going to train them, then you have probably wasted all of the time you have invested in the hiring process thus far. When someone asks you, going forward, ‘how to hire employees’, you know to start with the structure of the role first, with an understanding of the needs of the role.