Hiring people to expand your team is something that you will need to look for consistently as your business grows in revenues and turnover. However, if you are to hire the wrong person into your team, the cost of doing that can quickly escalate.
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online company Zappos which due over $2 billion in annual turnover indicated that
‘Bad hires have cost his company over $100 million.’
Businesses cannot afford to make costly mistakes. Especially rapidly growing businesses. Hiring people to expand your team is something that you will need to look for consistently as your business grows in revenues and turnover. However, if you are to hire the wrong person into your team, the cost of doing that can quickly escalate.
So what are the risks of making a bad hire?
1. Costs
The cost of recruiting, orientating and training a person. Especially a bad hire or bad employee do add up; and therefore if you realise that you have to let them go, re-hire, re-orientate and go through the process again. The cost to the business can really add up.
- Employee morale and productivity suffer.
If you to hire the wrong person into your team and not realise that very quickly and nip it in the bud. That person will not fit into the team, integrate into the culture and ethos of your business would impact on the morale and productivity of the other team members.
- The wrong team member can turn your customers away from your business.
Hiring the wrong team member to handle frontline work can particularly impact the revenue and profit of your business. Bad customer service can cost customers to take their business elsewhere.
- Exposure to legal risks.
When you hire a team member and orientate him/her into your company, there are labour rules and regulations that pertain to the particular country that you reside in that may govern the systematic correction of behaviour and the systematic dismissal of a full-time employee in your business. You do not want to go through that process unnecessarily because it will not only impact on that particular person, it will also impact on the wider team as well.
So how can we ensure that we get the right person into our team?
- Ask for References.
When you go through all the resumes and CV’s that you get in the job opening, what you need to do is ask for references. You need to check them, you need to cross reference them, ask for their social media profiles and ask for their permission if you can look into them to see how they are and how professional they are. Look at the samples of their work wherever possible, if they can give you samples of their work that will give you an idea of their approach and the methodology of their thought process and the quality of their work.
- Ask the Right Questions
Do your research and ask the right questions. I’ve come across employers who prepare general list of questions that they would ask potential employees. However, those people who take the time to formulate questions, that are specific to their business can elicit or can get answers from their interviewee, and get a better idea of how he/she would respond to a certain scenario in the business itself. So if you’re to take the time to ask the right questions, you will get the answers that you were actually looking for. As Anthony Robbins once said, “the quality of your answers that you want is very much dependent on the quality of the questions that you ask”. So if you were to take the time and effort to prepare the right questions you will get the answers that you want.
- Add an Outsider’s Perspective.
Get someone who has worked in business experience to sit down with you to go through the interview process. That person should ideally not be invested in that position so that he/she can provide you a different view point and a different thought process to the interview itself.
- If possible do not Hire on Urgency.
I know that people hire when they need a position and vacancy filled, but as a growing or rapidly growing business you can anticipate when this position will be created and you can then hire according to plan rather than in an urgency. That gives you the ability to decide that if the current applicants do not really ‘fit the mold’ you are not force or pressure to take the best one on the lot of people who has come in to apply for the position. Don’t hire on urgency, hire base on plans wherever possible.
- ‘Date’ before you ‘Marry’.
Put a probationary period of 3 moths or 6 months if you require for new employees; or hire them for a short period of time and see how they performed and how they integrate into the culture of your business and on the task at hand. Doing this will allow you to better understand and get to know the candidate better on the ground as how he/she performs.
- Set Clear Expectations.
Know what you want a new team member to achieve in this position for him/her to be successful in it. Set clear expectations and set a proper orientation process, whereby any person can go into and be adequately trained in that role. From there, identify within a period of time whether that person actually fits into that position or not. I know of business owners who have a 2 week target for certain objectives that a new employee should fit into that role and then a 2 month target. So in 2 weeks for example, that person should be able to handle these few things, in 2 months, that person could handle these few things; and he then sets that expectation along with the process of a new person to integrate into the company.
If you will to make the wrong choice unknowingly, these expectations that you have set will be one of your last stop measures to determine whether the person you just hired is competent or not to your standards. This is the process that you will have to fine tune and be very fair in setting out for both parties you yourself and the new team member coming into your business.
“The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world”. Steve Jobs
Most businesses may not have the reach of Apple Inc. where they can hire globally, however if you would to be serious and apply what I have mention in this video as thoroughly as you can, you would minimise the chances of hiring the wrong person into your team.
If you wish to know what a business would need to consider when facing exponential growth? You can download the free preview of my book to get a first chapter of that absolutely free. Just click here.
