How To Hire Great Employees For Small Business

I’ve been asked several times in the last month about how to hire great employees or Independent Contractors. Let’s be honest, hiring mistakes are incredibly expensive and frustrating. 

Hiring the wrong person can bring down morale on the team, slow down efficiency, create costly mistakes and even lose you customers. 

However having the right person on your team makes you more excited to go to work each day, helps increase your profits, and enhances the team work you’ve strived so hard to build. Knowing how to hire great employees or IC’s is a skill EVERY SINGLE BUSINESS OWNER NEEDS!

Here’s my 8 step hiring process.

1. Look at roles not tasks: I used to just hire people to perform a group of tasks. The trouble is, it’s hard to develop a team member with a task list mentality into an innovator and contributor in your organization. If you start out by assigning roles from the beginning, you’ll hire people who are going to help you grow the business, not just check things off of a to do list.
2. Hire backwards. Most people think of what tasks they need done, followed by what skills the team member will need to have, and then look at the drivers, and then see what they can produce with this particular team member. Let’s do that backwards. Instead, let’s look at what outcomes we want to produce, determine what motivation and drivers they need to have, then decide the skills they need to have and what tasks we will have them do.
3. Post a popping job description with an instruction to see if they follow instructions.There are so many boring job posts, I promise it’s not hard to write something that stands out. If you want to know how to hire great employees, write a job description that is compelling.
4. Weed out the unqualified and don’t get discouraged. There are a lot of them. It’s no big deal. There are good people mixed in with the bad ones. 
5. Schedule a group interview/ info meeting. This will save you a ton of time. Instead of doing a 15 minute interview with each of the top 10 prospects. Bring all 10 together and do an info meeting to make sure they are really interested in the job and that we are actually interested in them.
6. Give them a follow up task. We need to see who is serious at this point. Give your applicants something you want them to do in order to schedule their interview. That way you can see who is able to follow instructions, who is really interested, and who is a team player.
7. Individual interview. Now that we know more about the candidates, and who is actually interested and excited about the job, lets get them on a call and take the interview to the next level.
8. Skills Assessment. It’s easy to say that you can do something, and a charismatic person will always sound amazing. But I need to actually know that the candidate can deliver what they say they can deliver. So I hold a skills assessment for each new hire. Watch this week’s YouTube Video for more examples of how I assess skills in the different types of positions. And make sure you understand your state’s laws that effect how you do the skills assessments. But pretty please, don’t skip this one!

Now you know how to hire great employees and Independent Contractors for your business so you can have the right talent on your team! Happy hiring!