After launching your business, one of the challenges you might face as an entrepreneur is hiring the best hands to help grow your business. There are different strategies in the books on how to do this, and this article will expose some of them to you. Ensure to look out for the following points.
10 Mistakes you might be Making in Your Hiring Process
- Hiring a full-time employee when you only need a freelancer
- Failing to understand the cost/benefit of a new employee before you hire
- Not treating great applicants like great customers
- Avoid hiring employees that thrive at each stage of the company life cycle
- Refusing to use data to optimize your hiring time
5 Ways to Hire the Best People for the Long Term
- Understand how the candidate’s aspiration fits with the job
- The gems found in a resume are not business accomplishments
- Promote from within and thank often
- Profit-sharing proves to be more valuable than offering equity
- Take your time
The truth is that whether your company is well established or a new startup, you should approach hiring as a way to build the company, not just fill a position. Hiring is a huge responsibility that will determine your company’s culture and its future.
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Before we can even figure out the best ways to go about it, let’s see some of the mistakes you might be making in your hiring process, then we will get a better picture of hiring the best people for the long term.
10 Mistakes you might be Making in Your Hiring Process
1. Hiring a full-time employee when you only need a freelancer
Sometimes math just isn’t on your side, but you still have a job that needs to be done. In fact, you may want to consider freelancers even if you can afford a regular employee.
Many freelancers will jump at the opportunity to join a fast-growing startup in the early days, and you get the chance to see how they work and how well you work together.
2. Failing to understand the cost/benefit of a new employee before you hire
Before you hire, you need to know what the potential costs and benefits are. This is considered to be part of best practices for recruiting employees. When figuring out the potential cost, be thorough and include everything so you have the full picture.
A lot of the experts stress taking your time when you hire, which is hard for startups to do – they’re used to moving fast.
3. Not treating great applicants like great customers
Treat your recruitment strategy like you do your marketing and sales funnel. If you receive a high-quality lead, would you wait 3 days to call that lead? Then don’t do that to a high-quality candidate.
You should move heaven and earth to accommodate that candidate, impress them and treat them to a great hiring experience.
4. Avoid hiring employees that thrive at each stage of the company lifecycle
You’ll need the kind of people that can navigate a fast-changing landscape with little oversight and guidance, and quickly learn new tasks as they become necessary.
Not sure if an employee can “hack” the startup environment? Try freelancing first, as we mentioned earlier, or do what companies like Automattic do – figure it out by having potential employees do real (paid) tasks with the team before making it official.
As your company grows, you’ll want to start thinking about specialists that know a particular area inside and out. For example, you may find that Google Adwords is key to your growth strategy, and your budget justifies hiring a full-time PPC manager.
As your startup evolves, you we need employees who can evolve with it, Evolution, iteration, change… that’s what startups are all about.
5. Refusing to using data to optimize your hiring time
When we talked to the experts about recruitment strategies, another issue that came up over and over again was timing. Hire too slow, and you’ll be bringing on employees to help mitigate disasters. Hire too quickly, and you won’t get the best people.
To help you gauge if you’re getting the timing right, you’ll want to start measuring your time to hire. Knowing this will help your company determine how much lead time you need for effective recruitment.
6. Not having a strategy to attract the best cultural fits
Great companies are honest about their culture. They don’t want everyone to apply for their jobs, and you don’t either. Who wants to pick through a mountain of resumes full of potential new hires that aren’t going to work out?
When you’re promoting your employer brand, whether it’s on your career page, social media or at an event, be honest and convey real information about daily life at the company. Most people don’t want to work for companies where they don’t think they’ll fit in.
7. Ignoring passive candidates
Do you know where the biggest untapped source of potential candidates is? It’s in the 75 percent of people who aren’t even looking for a new job but would consider an offer if it came their way.
Try recruiting with social media as one of your sourcing methods in recruitment. The best passive talent may not be checking out job boards, but they probably have accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. We’ve written up some great social recruiting tips that will help you get a jumpstart.
8. Not profiling your best employees
Look at the performance of your best employee to date. What makes that person special? Is it domain expertise? or hunger and drive? Could it be raw intellectual horsepower? Maybe it’s the will to learn and try new things?
Whatever it is about that person, use it as a gauge to create your core values, and then hire for those values. Imagine a company where your entire team performs at the level of your best employee.
9. Ignoring rehires and alumni
Keep up with former employees if they performed well and left under positive circumstances. After all, they already know your company culture, and you know them.
Turning rehires into a source of employees is easy as well. First of all, make sure that they’re treated with respect when they exit, and that you do a great job with communication as they go.
10. Failing to nurture your talent pool with drip email marketing
Once you’ve made the decision to hire for a position, put the rest of the promising candidates into a campaign that sends a drip email 2-3 times per year.
Keep the emails simple. Remind people who you and your company are, ask them how they’re doing, and make it easy for them to check out your careers page and connect with your company on social media if they want more info.
If you have been making one or all of these mistakes in your hiring process, now is the time to reevaluate your hiring strategies to make it possible for your to get the best people for your business.
A lot of methods can be employed in other to achieve your desired hiring results. We will now consider 10 ways you can hire the best people for your company with the long term in view.
Read Also: 8 Skills every Entrepreneur needs to master
5 Ways to Hire the Best People for the Long Term
1. Understand how the candidate’s aspiration fits with the job
As you create the job description for the role you’re hoping to fill, pay attention to how you see the position growing within the next few years. How does your ideal candidate fit into your growth plan for your business?
According to Piyush Jain of SIMpalm, “During the hiring process, we always want to understand candidate’s aspirations, How do they want to grow their career in the next three years? Why do they think this job can help them fulfill their aspirations? ”
For Jain, getting a sense of the career goals of each potential candidate is a key part of the interview process. “It really helps us see what a candidate thinks of the available job and if they could be a good fit,” he says.
It’s important to get a clear sense of both how you foresee the ideal candidate growing in the role that you’re hiring for, as well as an understanding of the career goals of your potential candidates.
Getting a sense of both aspects will help you determine whether or not there is alignment between your job candidate and the company’s goals.
2. The gems found in a resume are not business accomplishments
Resumes that focus on achievements in sales, promotions or other business success don’t always produce the best candidates and are more times than not a red flag for me. Watch out for the possessive adjective “my,” such as “my team” or “my account manager.”
A boastful person doesn’t make a collaborative team member. Instead, look for a candidate who shows their cooperation on projects and is comfortable giving credit to others.
Education and experience are valuable, but a global perspective is probably even more so. Study and work conducted outside of hometowns, especially abroad, show that the person is likely curious, exposed to a variety of different experiences and willing to understand different perspectives.
Additionally, look for candidates who show an interest in their own personal growth, not someone who simply wants to repeat what they’ve previously done in their past employment.
Sometimes experience can be overrated — and maybe even a liability — as the individual might not want to learn from others or try new methods. You have to be willing to give someone the opportunity to exceed your expectations as well as their own.
3. Promote from within and thank often
Your people need to know that you care about them and their future. The most valuable employees are the ones who want to seek out new challenges and ways to grow. Sometimes the experience is overrated if the person doesn’t show any interest in growing with the company.
If an employee shows commitment and passion in their current role but requests consideration for a promotion or transfer to another department, they’re showing you they want to stay and are up for proving themselves in a new way.
In addition to promoting from within, business leaders should find the time to send an email thanking individuals for the work and value they bring to the company. Make the time to do this as often as you can.
Build community through annual company-wide awards. Don’t focus on sales numbers or other competitive goals, but on awards for employees who volunteered to help others on projects, made themselves available and reliable the most and contributed to positive company culture.
4. Profit-sharing proves to be more valuable than offering equity
To decrease turnover and hire for the long term, companies need to offer more than short-term benefits. It’s become a common practice in Silicon Valley to give employees an equity stake in the company in exchange for accepting a below-market salary.
These employees bank on a financial windfall after an IPO or a sale. Despite some headlines, the unfortunate truth is that over 90 percent of startups fail and even when they don’t, stock options very rarely become valuable.
Companies should absolutely share in their wealth after an IPO or sale, but by offering equity as it’s currently done in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurs should be prepared for employees to turn over every two to four years, as startup culture encourages people to hop around collecting shares from different companies.
An entrepreneur focused on growth and positive impact would not want employees and executives focused on an exit.
Conversely, profit-sharing gets the entire team focused on building a healthy and long-lasting business because everyone gets a share of the business’s success. This builds greater buy-in to the company’s mission, helps keep employees motivated and fosters a company building mentality rather than a stock appreciation mentality.
Read Also: 10 Strategies to Improve Your Customer Service Experience
Employees can get a profit check even when profits are flat. There is nothing wrong with taking care of your people, vendors, and community even in slow periods.
5. Take your time
You might be eager to fill a specific role within your business, but don’t rush it. Trying to hire someone as quickly as possible increases the likelihood that you’ll wind up with someone who ultimately isn’t a great fit.
“We’ve accepted the discomfort of a long, drawn-out hiring process,” says Chris Savage of Wistia. “We’ve interviewed hundreds of candidates for individual roles, and every time we waited for the ‘right’ person, it paid off.”
Savage also adds that going slowly with the hiring process helps to impress upon your current employees that you prioritize selecting someone who truly meshes with your company culture and that you respect them enough to hold out for the perfect person. “Being selective about who you bring onto your team shows your employees that you really care about who they work with, and who might end up managing or leading them in the future,” he says.
As you will have seen from the above tips, the hiring process is not an easy one especially if you plan on hiring for the long term. But if you follow the points highlighted above, getting the best talents for the long term is very possible and can be achieved.
