“Hire superstars only; don’t settle for average…The best predictor of their future performance is their past performance, actually.” – Eben Pagan
Running a successful business is not just about selling a product or service. To get to the top of your industry and stay there, you must learn how to hire employees who will stick with your company for years to come.
The cost of hiring the wrong person is high, but the cost of keeping the wrong person is even higher. According to one well-known recruiter, the real cost of bringing on a new employee is $240,000. But if you keep the wrong employee for, say, two and a half years before firing and replacing them, that bad hire will have cost you close to $840,000 when you factor in total compensation, hiring, disruption costs, severance and so on.
Your investment in learning how to find good employees far outweighs their contribution. Even if you go through all of the right processes to hire the right person, you may end up with someone who interviews well but isn’t an outstanding performer. That’s why entrepreneur Eben Pagan says, “Hire slowly, fire quickly.”
The bottom line of a business is not its monetary bottom line – it’s the people whose energy and efforts make the company what it is. Your people are part and parcel to your strategy for building a profitable business. Unlocking the keys to how to hire employees – from finding good candidates to evaluating performance post-hire – will save you the time and expense of a bad fit.
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How to hire great employees
Instincts alone aren’t enough to properly find, hire and evaluate employees. You also need the right skills and strategies.
1. Understand your company values
Before you can determine how to hire employees who are a good fit, you must understand who you are as a company. As a leader, you set the bar for your company’s culture and core values, which are readily apparent in your customer’s experience. When you run a business, you’re leading a group of people with needs and feelings as well as skills and job roles. Without the capacity to communicate your vision and what your company stands for, your recruiting process falls flat.
2. Leverage your network
Leverage is a key business concept that means using the resources you have in order to achieve your goals. As Tony Robbins says, “It’s not the lack of resources, it’s your lack of resourcefulness that stops you.” In terms of learning how to find good employees, resourcefulness means looking to your network, including referrals from your current employees, mastermind groups or mentors and even social media. Surround yourself with smart, hard-working people – then encourage them to share your job posting.
3. Look for a fit with your team
In one study 86% of executives said poor collaboration is a major cause of business failure. They understand that teamwork has a direct effect on productivity and profitability. Use the DISC assessment to evaluate your current team, then use it as a tool for how to hire great employees. It will help you understand the soft skills, personality type and communication styles each potential hire might bring to your team.
4. Prioritize communication skills
When it comes to mastering how to find good employees, research shows that employers prioritize a recruit’s communication skills over any other attribute. Researchers surveyed nearly 1,000 recruiters who solicited potential hires on business school campuses. These recruiters put communication skills like speaking, listening, writing and presenting at the top of their list of desirable traits.
Why does a so-called “soft skill” like communication play such a pivotal role in learning how to hire great employees? Communication skills are more elusive than hard skills like technical knowledge, distinguishing average talent from rockstar talent.
5. Evaluate new hires
Your responsibilities don’t end once you’ve decided on the ideal candidate and hired them. You must follow up – and you must go beyond the typical questions to ask new hires and dig deeper. Eben Pagan has created a straightforward system to determine whether your new hire’s performance meets your standards as quickly as possible – it’s called the daily update.
In this interview, available in its full length in the DVD set of The New Money Masters , Eben teaches Tony Robbins his questions to ask new hires as part of his system for evaluating new hires. Embracing the communication strategies behind Pagan’s method is one of the most effective ways to learn how to hire employees.
6. Engage in daily communication
One crucial trait of the daily update is that it happens every day for the first 30 days. By engaging in daily communication with new employees, you’re able to pinpoint and solve problems and determine if they are a superstar – or cut ties if the fit isn’t there. Ask your new hires three questions at the end of each day:
What they did that day and the results they got
Any problems or challenges they faced
Questions they have for you
By soliciting your new hire’s honest feedback, you’re also able to pinpoint areas where your training processes or overall operations need revamping. This straightforward and efficient tool could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
7. Work on your leadership skills
A business is only as strong as the psychology and skills of its leader. Discover your business identity to understand yourself more fully and build a team that will propel your company to the top. Learn how to build better connections – one of the most fundamental ways to hire good employees, since it’s this rapport that ultimately cements the relationships that hold your company together. Work on your communication skills to create a culture of strategic innovation where creativity and problem solving can flourish – and that creates raving fan employees who want to bring in more superstar talent.
Your hiring practices can make or break your business. When you understand how to hire employees through a careful and strategic onboarding system, you’re able to create a passionate, cross-functional team that thrives.
