How do I hire the right people for the direction my company is growing? Of course, who you hire is critical to your organization on many levels but ‘how’ you hire employees should include patient and thoughtful evaluations. The tangible Q&A is simple…are they skilled appropriately, do they fit into the culture, and will they stay for the long run.
The intangible questions, however, are much harder for small businesses that need people NOW. How you go about answering questions like, “do we hire a generalist or specialist” can make all the difference? The answer depends, but if you’re growing you need to decide before you hire. It’s very tempting to fall in the rut of hiring cheap and hoping it works out. Please remember that ‘hope’ is not an established business strategy. Well, it is used as a strategy all the time, but it doesn’t work that well.
Maybe this post is already conjuring past hiring decisions you regret. That’s ok, failure is a good teacher if you are learning and changing. The bottom line for any business that is growing either unintentionally or intentionally is – quality. The quality of your people will define the quality of your products and services. An employee that can do lots of different things might be the right fit for you, but make sure. If you hire a generalist for a more specialized function, your quality will suffer, and your growth will be limited because you’ll lose customers over issues of inadequate quality.
A starting point for ‘strategically’ hiring a new employee is to map their time over the next year. Go to the whiteboard and (row) the months across the top and (column) the specific job functions down the left-hand side. Estimate the percentage of time spent on each job function, by month, until you have a good picture of what kind of employee you need. Don’t just leave this exercise on the whiteboard, capture it, and put in the job description for the employee. The average job description often covers the primary responsibilities of a given position but putting percentages on the expectation of “time spent” on each of those priorities is a game changer. It will help, immensely, with mapping out the landscape in a way that refines and clarifies what’s most important. This exercise also becomes an essential basis for ongoing performance evaluations. If your company employs a “pay for performance” culture, this process can help clarify expectations and become the basis for ongoing performance evaluations. A tight correlation between performance expectations and performance evaluations set the stage for what’s known as performance continuity – marker of extraordinarily successful companies.