As your small business grows, you know the importance that finding the right team members can play. Having a great team working under you often is the difference between you regaining time back in your business, and it still being dependent on your every move. The wrong people in the wrong seats means the business will always need your input, your decision making, and your influence. But the right people in the right seats can make a world of difference. So how do you find those people?
In Perfect Day Business Mentorship, we teach a concept called The Hiring Hierarchy, and the Staff Feedback Loop. These are two concepts that work hand in hand to ensure that the right people are being recruited, hired, onboarded, and determines how they’re moved through your training and feedback systems. Most small business owners don’t have a method to their hiring process, and this doesn’t allow the business owner to step back into higher-valued roles, or remove themselves from the day-to-day operations.
Before You Hire
When small business owners are searching for the solution to their hiring process, they often start at the actual hiring task. However, the mistake is truly made before the hiring search even begins. Prior to searching for a new team member, it’s important to take a good look at the systems in place, and the tasks that this new hire will be required to perform.
Instead of creating a new role, the owner should look at the tasks they are currently performing. As they go through every single thing they do in their day and week, they should offload the lowest-valued tasks to a new hire. This essentially frees up and buys back time for the owner, so they can focus on more important tasks in the business.
Once the tasks have been identified, all tasks should have accompanying standard operating procedures (SOP’s) – a set of instructions on how to clearly perform the task. This is often the boring work that the business owner hides from, but it’s the most important work. If this is ignored, the new hire will be onboarded into a role that isn’t clearly defined, and this will create headaches down the road. (Hint: If you find yourself saying, “They should just know how to do that!” then you’re probably at fault for not having clear SOP’s in place!)
The Hiring Hierarchy
Once the tasks and SOP’s have clearly been defined for this new hire, it’s time to set out on the search. There’s active ways to do this, and passive ways. Most take the passive route and they stop there. The search continues on for a very long time and either elicits no responses, or weak candidates. It’s important to take both the active and passive approaches.
Passive Approaches
To start, have the passive approaches running in the background while you take an active stance on your recruitment. Posting your job on any local, provincial/state, and federal job boards is a basic starting place, as well as going to your local colleges/universities and posting on the school’s job boards. This way, these can run in the background while you’re working hard at your active processes.
Active Approaches
An easy way to find someone qualified for your job is to go to similar businesses like yours or the type of skills you want that person to possess, and find others already performing that job. This route can be mildly uncomfortable for some, but it can result in really great candidates for your business.
However, the first and foremost best place for recruiting great employees is always internal. Your best customers will often make great recruits – if your business doesn’t require any specialty long-term education – because they already know the culture and expectations of your company. Go through your client list to find who might be a great candidate based on their personality and whether that fits in with your team’s core values. Take them out for coffee and show them the opportunity, to gauge if they have any interest.
The last recommendation is to ask your staff internally if they have any referrals or recommendations, as your staff should understand your team core values, and will be able to recommend a great fit for the team.
Post Hiring
Having SOP’s and finding a great candidate is not the end of the journey though for this new hire. Once the new hire is made, your onboarding process is crucial in the ongoing success of this candidate. Remember that having this system flowing effectively will mean the difference between the business still needing to depend on the owner or not. Getting this right is imperative!
This new hire should be presented with clear expectations of what their job entails, what tasks are expected from them, and what the end results are that they are expected to uphold. Every 90 days, this employee should be receiving an evaluation based on those expectations, and then given support and feedback as necessary to continue their development.
Hiring goes wrong when pieces of this puzzle are skipped. The easiest way to know if a piece has been skipped is if the owner still feels their involvement in any part of the new hire’s tasks, if they’re constantly micromanaging the staff, or most importantly, if they find themselves saying: “They should just know how to do this!” or, “It would be faster and easier if I just did it myself!”
While hiring the right key player is important, setting them up for success is even more important. You can lose a total rockstar if they aren’t given the right tools to help them succeed. Instead, set your systems up to allow this person to excel at their new role, while you step back and buy back your time.
Take one of our FREE Brainstorm Sessions with our PDBM Team, and let’s identify what bottlenecks exist in your business when it comes to staffing. We’ll put together a plan to help you get forward momentum and make your next hires more effective, so you can continue to grow your business while spending a little less working IN your business. The link to book is here.