The Next Right Hire
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🕓 5 Minute Read
TL;DR
Researching, reviewing, and interviewing for your next hire can be a tiring process. But, if we take some time on the front-end to know exactly what we’re hiring for, the task and outcome can be far more beneficial in the end.
Understand the role for which you're hiring
Draft a clear description of what they'll do
Create a profile of what/who the person should be
Transition to recruiting by developing a mindset of pre-hiring when networking and meeting new people
Key Takeaways ⭢
4 of the most effective practices to improving your hiring process:
It takes a certain kind of person to enjoy the hiring process. Posting jobs, reviewing resumes, and taking interviews for days—or weeks—on end can be tiring. Couple that with the fear of hiring the wrong person and you have the makeup for a week ending in exhaustion. Even if we hold to the old adage, "Hire slow, fire fast," there can still be stress throughout it all—fast or slow.
Within the hiring process, there are two predominant approaches: hire the best people available and figure out how to use them, or know the roles/positions you need and try hire the best person accordingly. Well, we finally have an answer for this age-old question...
It depends. 😏
If you're doing something that has never been done before (and truly never done before), you might not know what roles are needed and, therefore, don't know what to hire for. In this case, it might be best to offer jobs to the best and brightest, then experiment, iterate and grow your company and you specialize your team.
If if you aren't doing something that has never been done before (which is probably you, no offense), you can get a good idea of who you need and what roles are needed. When you're in this position, you're at an advantage and the hiring process can go quite smoothly. Here is a potential guide to help you find the right person for the right role.
1. Understand the exact role for which you're hiring.
It's hard to hire for a position you aren't aware of. (You can quote us on that!) The first step is to make sure you understand the best next hire. Take some time to review your business goals and identify the gaps in your team that are holding you back from where you want to go. You could also survey your competitor's team to get an idea of what they think is necessary for their plan. There is also something to be said about trusting your intuition. Whatever your system, decide on what the position is and move forward.
2. Draft a clear description of what they'll do.
Make a list of everything you can imagine this person doing. Once you have a thorough list, begin to narrow it down to a dozen of the most important items on the list. If that wasn't hard enough, now you're going to pick the one thing you need this person to be the best at. This one thing is what you should compromisingly hire against.
In his book, the Effective Executive, Peter Drucker calls his listeners to hire and promote based on someone's strengths. A trap a leader can fall into is hiring to minimize weaknesses instead of maximizing strengths. A key point for the Strengths Finders research is to discovery your strengths and ruthlessly develop them, while getting weakness to a place where they aren't holding you back. Strengths must be the filter by which we base our hiring decisions through.
“The best decision we can make when hiring is knowing the one thing we need the new hire to be the best at and then set them loose.”
3. Create a profile of what/who the person should be.
Lastly, make a short description of the ideal person you need. Describe their personality and how they interact with your current team. Illustrate how you need them to work and the ideal workflow you need from them. Detail what tools you'd prefer them to us, the style they default to, and any other character traits that are needed. Once you have this applicant persona in place, use it to pinpoint dealbreakers. But, be careful not to let the subjective preferences overshadow the game-changing strengths.
Above all: Recruit, Don't Hire
While hiring in this more traditional fashion might be beneficial, there is another option. Maybe you shouldn't hire at all. Instead, consider recruiting.
As you network and meet new people, cultivate the mindset of recruiting. Listen and learn from the people you meet and imagine how this person could join your team one day and add value. Then, when it comes time for your next employee, you'll know a handful of people who you've essentially prescreened and somewhat interviewed. Hiring from a relationship (albeit a small one) is much less risky than hiring from a long list of resumes off a website.
Want more content like this?
This article was based on a segment of one of our Brave Talks podcast episodes. You can hear more about hiring, and the general concept of mastery, in episode 003, Vocational Mastery.
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