The 4 traits you should look at when your hiring…
How these can make or break your business!
Everytime you hire someone new you take a risk. You take a risk by having a stranger being in your business, you take a risk by adding a new member to the team that could lower the productivity and many other risks. This article will help you reduce this risk and set you for success in your hiring processes. This will make your business better and will grow your profits because if you build a great team your customers will feel that and buy from you again and again.
There are many books on this subject and if you read them all you will find authors that say that you should look at a 50+ list of traits to look at when hiring. You, as an entrepreneur you don’t have the time, to do that or the money to hire an agency to get you, workers, like big corporations do. This is why, after reading more than 10 books on this subject and hiring over 10 people in my business, I come up with these 4 traits, that are easy to check and could really help you find good people.
Great vision without great people is irrelevant. – Jim Collins
Before I deep into each trait I want to ask you a question: Why do you want to hire someone new? Before you ever hire a person you be clear in your mind what is the skill that is needed right now in your business. When you have the skill you need to ask yourself if you really need a human or can this activity also be done by a machine with a little bit of programming…
For example: Many small business I’ve worked with said that they had no time to focus on Social Media (Instagram, Facebook, etc) and most people they hired were not careful at spelling or they were not taking care of the customers. After having a conversation they discovered how they can do their social media with tools and automation in 1 hour on Sunday in order to schedule everything for next week and 5–10 minutes each day shooting something interesting in their business with their smartphone. Most platforms now have the ability or have different apps that allow you to send a quick message response when someone contacts you. This will remove human spelling mistakes and go automatic to your customer. This is a case where small business owners didn’t needed to hire someone. They actually liked creating marketing contend and connecting with their clients.
If you decided that the skill can’t be done automatically by an AI, you need to look for 4 traits when hiring someone:
- Love
- Trust
- Speed
- Improvement
That’s all. You can go do some interviews now! Joking, let’s take each one and allow me to help you discover why these traits are really important. Other skills and abilities can be developed at work, but these 4 are a must when you think of getting someone new in your business.
1. LOVE
Love is very important. If you can find someone who loves his work as you love your business, you hit the jackpot. For this, you also have to be very clear when you present your company and your vision. You have to remember that people only work with people. This means that you have to make a good presentation as your employee at the first interview.
Most people consider that love is a feeling. I believe that love is a verb. If you are a parent you totally understand me. No matter how many trouble your child makes, you still love him and want him to succeed. If you can influence someone to love your company he will do whatever it takes to see it succeed.
For love, there is no manual that can teach someone how to do it. When you love someone or something you will do whatever it takes to make the other person feel good of the business you love to succeed, in this case, your business.
So, how do you find people that love your business? There is a simple way I learned from Brendon Burchard. I would like to personally thank him for all the hard work he is doing in providing entrepreneurs with basically everything he does in his business in order to get to the next level. When you sit down with somebody at an interview try to discover more about a project they worked at in a previous job and ask questions like:
- When is a time when you had a project that went wrong?
- What do you feel was the problem there?
- How did that make you feel?
These are called probing questions and here you are not specifically looking at their answer, but you analyze how they answer. What do I mean? You are searching to see if the potential candidate is sad because the project went bad or if they just blame somebody else. This is so important in an interview. This allows you to foresee how the worker is going to act in a difficult situation. If they have love, they will take the blame and try to improve the situation. If they don’t they will try to find somebody to blame and you don’t want complainer or negative people in your business.
2. Trust
No relationship can develop without trust. If you don’t trust your workers, they are constantly going to look for ways to avoid work or maybe take some shortcuts that are not beneficial for your business. If you are micromanaging things you are not trusting your employee to do their job and you basically have no business, you have just a job with fewer benefits.
I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you. ― Friedrich Nietzsche
Trust doesn’t develop overnight. When you are hiring someone new you have to give it time for the relationship to build up. When you have a new employee you have to act like if you have a new child. No matter if he worked in a similar position, he didn’t work with you and your company. Give it at least 2–3 months for the “child” to grow up and learn everything that he has to know about your business vision, how things are done in your business and what is expected from him.
As you will work with a new child, you don’t have to micromanage very long. When you see that your employee learned how to do something let him do his job and don’t be a constant pain in the ass with directions. A micromanaged worker will stop thinking on themselves and you might not discover maybe a simple way to do things that get the same outcome. This has to be more like monitoring then micromanaging.
You also have to set expectations. These are very important because if your new hire doesn’t know what is expected from him, how is he ever going to meet your demands. As the relationship evolves, you will develop trust in both directions. You are going to trust the person to do his job. Your employee is going to trust you to not interfere with his work and allow him to do his job.
When I hire a new talent, I micromanage them until I trust them and it’s not necessarily micromanaging any more. — Mark Cuban
3. Speed
Speed is very important for any business. If you would have to choose from two people, one who completes a job in 1 hour and one who completes it in 2 hours who would you choose. This is something to have in mind everytime you hire someone new because it can slow your business down if you don’t monitor it.
Right now your workers have a speed of doing things and if you hire someone who is slow, they are going to get delayed and all your productivity can decrease. If the productivity decreases, you will have less good or services for your customers. If that happens you will have less money and that is not a good situation to be in. You must strive to improve your profits from year to year.
Many people say that you can have either efficiency or speed, but I believe that is a myth. You can have both, you just have to be very methodical when hiring.
If you are in a startup environment, speeds because some much more important then if you have an established business. In a startup, your workers wear many hats and if there is a delayed, it can “help” you lose one important client. One lost important client can slow down your business. Here you also have an advantage. In a startup, you have fewer people and you can easily change the route. If you see that the market is going in one direction you can easily change the lane and choose a better route. The established business will change much hard because there are many people involved.
4. Improvement
Tony Robbins talks about CANEI (constant and never-ending improvement). If someone doesn't have this desire to constantly improve is going to be very hard for them to stay competitive in this time and age. Now everything because automatic and many jobs from today will be replaced by AI in the short-term future. Applying CANEI is not just something that might be good for your workers to have, but is a must.
There are many people that are “know it all”. When you discover someone like that, that have an answer to everything, don’t hire them. These people are not going to be adaptive to change and are not going to move your business forward.
When in doubt, take the Thomas Edison test! When he interviewed people Edison for the research assistant position, he gave them a bowl of soup. Thomas always looked at what the other person is doing. If he added salt or pepper before they tasted the soup, the person failed the test. Edison didn’t want people that made assumptions because assumptions are killing innovation. And innovation can make or break your business.
When you find someone who is constantly improving you will have no problem giving them a task that requires learning something new.
Make it a rule in your business for everyone to read one business book per week and your business is going to grow much faster. When you interview someone to ask them what is the latest professional improvement book they’re read or listen or who do they like from their profession and what is the best thing they learned from them… If the person doesn’t have a clear answer you should think twice before hiring him.
👉 Please tap or click “👏” to help others get inspired and learn how to better hire people. Also, please let me know what you think about this article by leaving a comment below. I would like to start a conversation!
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