Tips for Hiring Employees

As your business grows, you may find yourself needing to hire employees. This can be overwhelming. So much so, that many business owners decide not to grow beyond the point where they can run the business themselves. They don’t want to have to deal with it. This is a valid concern. Dealing with employees is not always easy. If you do decide that you don’t want these concerns to stifle your growth, realize that there are smart and efficient ways to go about this. In this video, we will be discussing reasons you may want to hire employees and I’ll be giving 5 pieces of advice Let’s start with the reasons. Every business is different and there are lots of reasons you may need employees.

1- You may need employees to actually accomplish the job you need to do. If you own a restaurant, for example, you need employees just to have your doors open. Lots of service based businesses must have employees just to operate

2- You may find that you don’t have enough time to get everything done yourself. Hiring people will help your business from falling behind

3- When evaluating how you spend your time, you may realize that you aren’t efficiently allocating it because you are spending valuable hours doing things that you could hire other people to do. If you can spend time doing something that makes you $100 per hour, it doesn’t make sense doing a task that you can hire out for $20 per hour. Make sure you watch my video called “delegating and leveraging your time”. It may just change the way you operate.

4- You may not be an expert in an area and need someone more skilled in a particular area. Perhaps this is an accountant or bookkeeper. Maybe you have a professional bidder that bids on jobs or the service you provide is a specialty service that you can’t fulfil with your skill sets

5- You may be preparing for growth mode and are looking to the future of what is needed when you scale your operation. Whatever your reason is, it’s best that you go about hiring your staff the right way. I didn’t get any instruction or advice really when I hired my first few employees so I made some mistakes and did some things right. It would have been nice to have a little instruction on the basics of making and fulfilling these hiring decisions.

Here are 5 tips for hiring employees

1 – Quantify the decision

- This has to do with deciding whether or not this is a good financial decision. Almost every business decision can be quantified in some way if you try hard enough. I don’t always put enough effort into my business decisions to do this as well as I should but I try to quantify as much as possible. For example, the last person I hired was a full time marketing manager. His job is to lead our marketing and networking efforts with social media, business to business networking, customer retention and even a little sales, etc. I asked my manager to put together an analysis of what it would cost and at what point it would be worth hiring him for the salary we had discussed. We came up with a number. He had to increase our sales by a certain specific number in order for us to break even on the investment. We were a little on the fence as to whether or not his efforts would result in such an increase. We decided to negotiate slightly different kind of pay scale with some opportunities for performance based incentives and hire him. In addition to our cost analysis, we came up with some other reasons that it could be worth it. There were other money making opportunities that would present themselves with the help of his efforts and because we are in growth mode, we felt it would force us to commit to our growth strategy. Sometimes the best motivation is being forced to stick with a plan. The point is, we took some time to learn exactly how valuable the investment in hiring him would be and we moved forward in a manner that was still a risk, but a calculated one that we understood.

2- Pick the most qualified people you can find

This seems obvious; however, this is a big problem for many business owners. Most people are very hesitant to pick the most qualified candidate because it makes them feel self conscious. They might not know why a person that is more qualified than them would want to work for them rather than starting their own company. Well, there are lots of reasons. Maybe that person is very good at what they do but they have no ambition or desire to start their own company. They might feel more comfortable being in charge of someone less qualified. Trust me, I get it. I’ve been there. I had this problem in the beginning. Early on, I found myself preferring people with less skills and experience because it helped with my comfort zone levels. At one point, I had a discussion with my Dad who gave me the insight that this was a common hiring problem. He said, in his experience, people love to hire people less qualified than them, then those people hire less qualified people and the patter repeats. It ends up being a death spiral of worse and worse employees down the line. He encouraged me to hire the best possible candidate with the most experience possible. To try to find people far more talented than I. It was very good advice. Surrounding yourself with the very best people you possibly can is one of the best things you can do for your company. Don’t fall into the trap of hiring comfortable but less qualified applicants. Even if you are an employee yourself and you are playing the office politics game in the corporate world. The best thing you can do is hire the best people possible and it will make you look good.

3- Don’t settle for the wrong person

I’ve been in situations where I’ve interviewed a number of people and after the interviewing process, I was feeling tired and just wanted to pick someone but also no excited about any of them. Sometimes I just picked one. Well, often that has ended up being a mistake and they didn’t last very long. Sometimes part of the process of hiring someone is to keep looking until you find the right person for the job

4- Don’t conduct a stupid job interview

And don’t ask stupid questions of your job applicants. Asking people to sell you this pen or asking what their biggest weakness is gives you little information about the applicant at best and at worse, you may pass up the perfect person for the job because they weren’t clever enough with a trick question. I feel that I may be the perfect applicant for some sales jobs but if I was asked by the interviewer to sell them a pen as part of my job application, I would probably respond by saying the following: “I’m sorry but I know nothing about this pen and I have no idea if or why you should buy it. This really isn’t going to tell you anything about my sales skills and respectfully, if this is the kind of sales approach that goes on here I feel like I’m wasting my time”. Recently, I was filling out an application for a board position with an association and one of the questions had something to do with asking what one of my weaknesses was and I responded that I thought the question was silly. I’m obviously not the best person to give advice on showing your interview respect but these kinds of questions really aren’t going to give you an insight into the candidates qualifications or let you know if they are a good fit for the job. Tell them about the job and ask them questions that will give you a feel for their loyalty and experience and what kinds of things they would do in the job and how they can add value to your business. Okay, soap box is over on that.

5 - Make sure the situation is win-win

If your employee is not going to enjoy their time with your company, or find it doesn’t meet their needs, they aren’t going to last long. Make sure they feel they are being treated fairly, they will be in a work environment that they will enjoy and that they are incentivized and motivated to help your company grow. The right applicant isn’t just the person with the most experience but one you can trust, someone you will get along with and one that has the right attitude and hopefully someone that will have a long term investment in your company as you invest in them Thanks so much for listening and as always, make sure to subscribe and follow for new business tips and advice.