Ryan Binkley mentioned in his ebook, Building and Exiting A Desirable Business, that you need to hire the right people in order to build a buyer ready business.
To help build your core team, I’ve rounded up three valuable tips that will help you hire the right people.
1. Take your time.
Burton Goldfield, president & CEO of HR outsourcing firm TriNet, advises executives not to rush into a decision and fall in love with someone at first sight. His point is that you don’t have to sacrifice quality in a market that is oversaturated with talent if you don’t find someone right away. Take your time! Hiring based on desperation usually yields poor results.
Building on that, Score, a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses, recommends scheduling interviews when you can adequately prepare for them and give job candidates your undivided attention. Don’t forget that writing down key points from the interview right after it’s over can be a helpful tool days or even weeks later when deciding which person to hire.
2. Make it worth a job candidate’s time.
If you’re not willing to offer competitive compensation for your job, it will be difficult to find quality people that are willing to work for you. Talented and intelligent employees demand salaries and benefits packages based on their skill-sets and intangible assets.
Be prepared for this. Do your research to know what your competition is offering. A source such as salary.com is a free and useful tool that you can also use to determine comparable pay for jobs in your area. Not only will this help get top-notch people in the door, but also continuing to offer competitive incentives will help keep them there.
3. Don’t put someone in the wrong job.
Sometimes business owners admire and respect people so much that they hire “A players” just because they’re “A players”. They might not have a vacant position at the time, or there might be a job opening that isn’t the right fit for the candidate’s skill-set, but, nonetheless, the owners are so entranced by the “A player” that he or she gets hired.
Founder, CEO, and president of Headsets.com Mike Faith experienced this with the internal promotion of a long-standing employee that he describes as a “genius.” Because of his “genius” status, the company wanted to get him into middle management. This is how it played out:
“So we moved him into a management position, and it was a disaster. My “A player” quickly became a “B player”; management became a millstone around his neck. Recognizing our mistake, we moved him out of management. Now he takes on a variety of projects and is back to being a genius.”
The disaster Mike talks about can happen to any business owner if you put a great person in a job that isn’t suited for their skill-set.
Are there any other hiring tips that you’d like to share with other business owners?
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