I’ve been talking about hiring all month and offering you the download (for free) of my hiring process so you can hire better. 

Now we sell business coaching for trades and building business owners and for us this is marketing. I’m hoping you’ll like what I have to say and watch more of my videos and maybe book a discussion with me about coaching or come to one of our events to see if it’s for you.

That’s why it’s free.

But why should you use it? Well I’ll tell you.

Hiring good people is difficult. Everyone I know has cocked it up and hired someone unsuitably and when you do cock it up, it’s costly and frustrating.

If you hire someone who doesn’t work out (so not necessarily someone awful or outright bad, but someone who maybe didn’t make it past probation or who didn’t fit in or didn’t like it and left after six months or something) – if you hire someone and they don’t work out you’ve got to start recruiting again. You’ve got the time that you’ve lost a person while you’re trying to find someone to replace them, the time and effort and money, it’s going to cost you or your business to go through the recruitment process and a time while the new person settles in before they get good.

Not to mention the damage done to your culture by the unhappy, unmotivated person or the cost of fixing their mistakes or their poor performance. Or of course the slowing down of your growth.

A poor performer is costly, let’s agree on that and something to be avoided if possible. Better (surely) to hire someone good, someone suitable, in the first place.

So that’s the first reason to use a process because it’s painful if you get it wrong.

The second reason is that so many people do it wrong.

There are a few things going on here. We focus on the end goal and neglect to do our preparation work often. We focus on a certain type of person, perhaps. I hear people say things like “I’ll get a woman to help me in the office”. “Someone with kids who are at school now”.

There’s nothing much wrong with that. Women with kids at school can make great employees, they probably are less likely to move away because they want to give their kids stability at school. Except that’s just stereotyping and it’s not good to rely on a stereotype to find someone who’d be good at that job.

So don’t focus on that way of thinking about who you want. Follow a process. Follow this process:

Start by writing what you want them to do (the job description), then decide what you want them to be like. What behavioural attributes you want them to have.

Then you interview for those attributes – technical skills and behavioural attributes (rather than thinking that you should be hiring a woman because women are stable, decide you want to hire someone stable and use your interview questions and process to see if they are, instead of assuming).

So you use a process to stop yourself jumping the gun and heading in the wrong direction before you even start.

Another reason is because the hiring process is a very loaded situation. Specifically or especially the interview. You want this person to be the one, don’t you? Then you can get on with your work. And presumably the person you’re interviewing wants the job, too.

So it’s easy for both of you to rush to the conclusion that you’re made of each other and to just offer the job, shake hands and the job be done. But later on there’s a high chance you’ll regret this snap decision or realise it was a mistake.

So use your process to make sure you ask the questions and review and compare the answers and importantly check their references – before you commit.

Use the process to manage yourself and your natural tendency to do this badly and rush it and hire someone rubbish.

I’ll finish with a real life hiring cock up that I bet you’ve done.

You want someone. You focus on the title.

Let’s say a ‘Carpenter’. You don’t describe the role much more than that – we all know what a carpenter is, right?

Someone you know mentions someone they know who’s a carpenter and looking for a job. They say nice things about them but they’ve not actually worked together.

You call them, meet for a coffee. They seem nice, they’ve got a resume, and done carpentry. You move pretty quickly to “You seem great, I think you’ll fit in”.

You sort the money and agree to a probation period and away you go.

But they don’t work out. You didn’t really check. There are different types of carpentry, aren’t there? And they’re not skilled in the one you need. Your mate doesn’t know him well, you didn’t check references, turns out, someone who is friendly in a cafe job interview can be quite a miserable guts at work… etc.

If you haven’t done that, you’re amazing. We’ve all done it.

That’s what the process is for. 

Comment HIRING and we’ll send you the process.