5 Top Tips For Hiring the Right People for Your Business

I'm not going to lie. Hiring the right people for your business can be a daunting task, especially if it's a new venture or you are expanding. The wrong hire can cost your business money and valuable time in the long run, often resulting in under-production and a lackluster corporate culture.

If you have ever had to hire someone, chances are it has been stressful and you haven't been sure you've made the right decision. There are a lot of factors, both technical and non-technical, involved in making the right decision for a new employee but, let me give you some advice.?

Here are 5 top tips that will help you out when hiring and provide you with valuable insight into whether or not a candidate would be a good fit for your business.

Define Your Corporate Culture Before You Hire

The key to hiring the right people for your business is to start by matching them with the corporate culture. You want a good fit because it will help make the employees happier, more productive, and stay with you for longer. You can define your company culture through a myriad of ways. One way is to identify your company’s top five core values. These values will explain to everyone in your organization, and to new hires, what values and behaviors drive the company forward. What behaviors or values should every employee prioritize and treat each other and their work with?

At my company, Virtudesk, our core values include respect, integrity, reliability, dependability, consistency, and efficiency. When we work together and for our clients, we want to show respect, be reliable and dependable for others, and be consistent and efficient in our work.

I also recommend that you determine what you want the leadership style to be at all levels of management, and how problems will be addressed and solved. This is huge for creating a defined culture that people want to be in.

By having a clear idea of your company's culture you can better select candidates whose personality and values align with your company’s. Plus, you can create a job description that attracts their interest in the first place.

Have a Clear Job Description

How do you find the right people for your team? Having a clear job description is a big step in attracting candidates that suit your team's needs. The right person can make your business run more smoothly and increase productivity. Having the wrong person on board can be a huge drain on time and money.

How do you find the right person by creating a job description? When you create a job description and outline the type of person you’re looking for, you’re setting up expectations with your potential new hire right away. You explain what skills and characteristics will make them successful in the role and the company.

In your job description, make sure to outline what the company is about, the kind of person you’re looking for, the job duties and responsibilities, the required and preferred qualifications, and how to apply.?

Consider the Soft Skill Requirements of the Job

Let's face it — people who have soft skills are easier to work with. In fact, a study by Robert Half shows that employers said that the quality of soft skills, such as good communication and problem-solving abilities, are just as important as technical skills and experience when making hiring decisions.

Plus, here’s another piece of advice. It’s much harder to teach soft skills than it is to teach hard skills. You may be able to teach someone how to use Adobe Creative Suite, but it’s harder to teach them to have a positive attitude.?

So, if you’re looking at a group of candidates and you see someone without as much hard skill experience, but they fit your company culture more, they have an enthusiastic attitude and great soft skills, then they may be a better fit.

Don’t hire from hard skills alone.

At my company Virtudesk, we administer the DISC Profile Assessment to every employee we hire. The DISC personality assessment is a tool that profiles people’s personality traits based on observable behavior. It gauges people’s placement on a quadrant following the DISC model: Dominant, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness.

As a candidate selection tool, the DISC test can provide useful hiring insights that can be used to match people’s profiles and personalities with a particular job or role.?

?It can provide insights into how a potential candidate might behave in a certain role or handle certain situations or coworkers.?

?This is just one tool you can use to seriously look at a candidate’s soft skills.

Make Sure Potential Employees Match Your Vision, Culture, and Values

When you start a new business it's very tempting to grab the first person on your list that matches your list of technical qualifications. But if your goal is long-term growth you need to make sure the person aligns with the vision and culture of your company. I've been involved in a few startups myself, so I know how challenging it can be to get things off the ground and hire the right people. It's very difficult to build momentum when you're dragging employees who don't share your vision, culture or values along with you.

Get a Great Recruiting Team to Help with the Screening and Hiring Process

You've probably already heard the phrase "Hire slow, fire fast" — and it's true. Hiring a good team can make or break your company, and finding the right people is always difficult. Most entrepreneurs understand the importance of having a great recruiting team for putting together the best possible team for their business - you gotta have a great recruiting team. But what is a great recruiting team? A great recruiting team will have the combined expertise of screeners, recruiters and account managers who can help ensure that all applicants who apply for jobs with your company are going to be the perfect fit.

If you don’t currently have the resources to put together a great recruiting team, consider hiring a virtual assistant from a VA company. That’s because VA companies will help you skip these recruiting steps and therefore save you time. All you have to do is give them your job description, and they will select a handful of the most qualified candidates for you to interview and hire.?

The best part is that there is no extra fee for the recruiting process. When you start the service, you’ll pay a small set up fee for your virtual assistant, and then the hourly wage of the virtual assistant. That’s it. Plus, you can save upward of 78% of operating expenses when you hire a VA vs. an in-house employee.

The Key Takeaway

In the end, hiring great talent requires a lot of effort. It's important to remember that as an entrepreneur, if you are serious about your goals, you need to put in the hard work to hire the right people for your business. There's no way around it: hiring is a long and complicated process which requires planning, work, and lots of time. No matter how large or small your business may be, make sure you consider all of these factors when choosing between the many candidates for a job opening.?

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to recruit and find new staff for your business, you should consider hiring virtual assistants.?

This way, you can hire the right people and grow your business faster! That’s why I run almost my entire business with virtual assistants, because it helps me save time in the recruiting process, save time through delegation, and saves my company more money to reinvest it back into the business.

Along with hiring virtual assistants, if you follow this simple list of five tips, you should be well on your way to hiring people who will help your company succeed and grow into an even stronger competitor in the marketplace.

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