How to Find & Hire the Right Team Members at the Right Time
Author’s Note: Every State/Province and Country has its own legal requirements when it comes to employee paperwork or agreements, benefits, what is or is not permitted during an interview, employee vs contractor, part time vs full time, so this article won’t be covering the legalities. Instead, I will cover the cultural and operational process required to bring in the right team members at the right time. I recommend consulting legal or HR professionals in your area of business to cover your butt in that area, as I am neither a lawyer nor an HR expert.
Over the course of my 12 year career in operations, as an operations manager, as a Director of Ops & Logistics, or as a self-titled Operations Overlord, I have had multiple opportunities to hire, train, recruit, and fire team members. From full-time to remote contractors, I have read hundreds of applications, held dozens of interviews, and sent a lot of “Thank you, but we have decided to go with another candidate” emails. I’ve got stories, so many stories…
I have made many mistakes. Hiring the wrong person, paying someone too much or too little, people quitting soon after they began for another opportunity, and keeping someone who wasn’t the right fit for far too long because I didn’t want to try again or cover their desk until we found a new person.
There are four things that I want you to hold as true throughout this process:
People want to work with awesome people, and you’re awesome. So take pride in the fact that you’re undergoing this process.
The clearer you are about the outcomes of what you need, the more easily your future team members will be able to contribute to making them happen.
Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur so you are not ‘taking away’ anything from someone’s future by hiring them to work for you.
This process can take time. Spend more time here instead of rushing through it and ending up with the wrong people and having to start over. It is better to hire slow and fire fast, as one of my mentors liked to say.
There are three steps to this process:
First, understanding what success means for this role and who your ideal person is. Dream a little here. As much time as you spend working on your client avatar or your elevator pitch on who you help, (I help online entrepreneurs go from bottlenecked to streamlined) spend just as much working on your ideal team member avatar.
Second, putting candidates through a multi-step process to eliminate as much bias as possible and allow each candidate to shine in their own unique way. Additionally taking steps to ensure that a diverse range of abilities, people, backgrounds, and experiences are given the opportunity to apply for your position.
Third, creating and implementing an easy onboarding plan that introduces your new team member to your company, their peers, your culture and history, and gets them up to speed. Ideally this process should allow your new person to contribute and take ownership of items as quickly as possible.
Step 1: I Need to Hire Someone, Now What?
Congratulations! You’re growing and you’re ready to offload, delegate, or create something new in your business!
Before you get too far ahead of yourselves, it’s time to slow it down just a bit and create a foundation upon which to build your team. And that means creating a job description and really thinking on and getting some clarity on who the ideal team member is.
My favourite version of a job description was developed by Alex Charfen, what he calls a 4R Document. It goes far beyond outlining just a list of what a person does day in, day out, and instead gets into the role itself and how it contributes to the company and into the results, or, how this role will be successful.
Ask yourself these questions as you create your job description:
Why do we start with a job description and ideal team member avatar?
- Create clarity around the ideal person and how they can show up and contribute
- No ambiguity or confusion over what they are responsible for
- Easily communicate boundaries and scope of work to candidates and other team members
- Mitigate future ‘but I thought you were doing it’ conversations by having explicit expectations
Once you have the job description and a vision of who this ideal person is in your head, your next step is to create the job posting and application and get people into your hiring process.
In your job posting, I would highly recommend that you share, explicitly, your values as a company and the story, or vision, of this ideal candidate. You want to attract the right people to you, and repel the wrong people. Use strong language, be explicitly clear, and state what is both welcome and not welcome.
Once you have an application and a posting, share them far and wide. Post it in industry Facebook groups, share on social media, post on LinkedIn, ask your friends or clients to share, or try websites like Indeed, Ziprecruiter, or Glassdoor.
I have had the best luck with social media referrals and with posting in industry Facebook groups. Just as you want to hang out wherever your ideal clients hang out, the same goes with team members. Check out digital marketer groups, Certified OBM groups, or freelance groups, depending on what you are looking for. There are amazing people there that are hungry for work and looking for their next opportunity.
Step 2: How Do I Interview Someone?
Now that you have a clear job description, an ideal team member avatar, and a posting and application form that have been posted far and wide, the applicants will start to appear.
…… So now what?
To aid in finding the right candidate, and eliminating as much bias as possible, it is essential to go through a multi-stage interview process. This ensures that you are testing candidates for culture, skill, and ‘fit’, as well as making sure you are pulling from an adequate pool of candidates. Even if you think you know who you want to hire, or you want to work with a family member or friend, DO THIS PROCESS. Test your assumptions. Make sure you’re hiring the right person and that you’re not making a decision that you’ll regret later.
Although this may seem like a lot of work, at the end of the day, I have spent maybe 45-60 mins with my top candidates, and less than 15 mins with the wrong people.
Part 1: Personality & Culture
The purpose of this step is to ensure that candidates’ values align with that of the company; that there is congruence between how the candidate sees the world and the company mission, and how the internal team views the same. I also use this time to find out what they’re looking for from an opportunity, the type of work environments they appreciate, and how they like to work.
Part 2: Sample of Work
There was a brief two year period where I left the glamorous world of operations behind to work as a personal trainer at a boutique gym. During my trainer interview, I spent most of my time on the floor with the head trainer giving a showcase of my work: spotting him on a bench press, coming up with workout substitutions based on body pain, or coaching then through a mental block.
This was, essentially, my portfolio. A sample of my work.
The focus here is more on skillset and thought process, as they may not have enough context to perform an ‘exact’ task from their potential job. These tasks should be related to the role, with just enough detail to see how they would approach it and what questions they would ask.
Part 3: Formal Interview
Ok, we’ve arrived at the end! The final stage of hiring! This formal interview can be done 1:1 or with a group, but what is most essential here is that you have a deep conversation about the role, the outcomes this role has ownership of, what onboarding could look like, and come to an agreement on salary and time commitment. Review the exact job description and ask if they have any questions, chat about company culture.
You should have everything you need after this interview to be able to send them an offer letter and contract and have it be accepted with only minor negotiations.
Step 3: How Do I Onboard Effectively?
It is essential to have a well-documented onboarding process so that your new team member can be productive from their first day. This includes being prepared before their start date, integrating them into systems and culture as soon as possible, and providing them with a template of how they will interact with the team on an ongoing basis.
I recommend creating an onboarding plan for three reasons:
- So you as the employer understand how to show up for your new team member
- Your new team member understands how they need to show up for you and your business
- You cover everything listed in their job description and don’t have ‘scope creep’ (whereby you assign them tasks that aren’t on their job description)
As an employer, you can line up for them when you’ll be introducing them to or training them on new tasks, what meetings they are expected to attend, and who they’ll be working with.
This is a great way to make sure they won’t be overwhelmed with information and that you’re prepared with whatever you need for when they’re ready. The last thing you want to do is throw a bunch of stuff at them and watch them flail and try to juggle everything.
It’s better to start with pointed, specific actions that will build to taking on more ownership and responsibility gradually and consistently.
So that’s it!
That’s my process for finding the right people at the right time and getting them into my business as quickly as possible so they can contribute, feel valued, and we can move the needle forward.
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