Growing your team with the right candidates is vital to the success of your business. Every company is only as powerful as the people who are running it. So, in this blog, we’re going to talk about how to hire new team members. This includes how to handle the job posting, negotiating, and getting them to give you an answer sooner rather than later.
How to Hire Employees and Build Your Team
These tips will help you avoid some of the more common mistakes that business owners make when considering new candidates.
1. Have a Defined Process
In startups and small businesses especially, there’s a tendency to figure out things on the fly. That might work in the beginning, but as you scale, a lack of processes and systems is going to backfire — big time.
From start to finish, you should have a pretty good idea of what the interviewing and hiring process will look like. What information do you need to collect? Will you need to test candidates for any specific skills? Will they need multiple interviews? With whom? What is the rough timeframe for all of this?
Having an outlined process for how to hire employees will make the process quicker and easier, and you’ll be able to better find the most qualified candidates.
Now, all that being said…
2. If Necessary, Have Multiple Customized Hiring Processes
The hiring process for every position in your company won’t look the same. Interviewing potential in-house accountants might look vastly different from hiring a copy editor. So, those processes need to reflect that.
However, one word of advice: You don’t need to create a unique process for every single candidate. Rather, consider unique processes for different types of positions. For example, hiring for positions that are heavy on data (accountants, sales reps, engineers) might require something different from hiring for positions that rely a lot on content (marketing, branding).
Similarly, the hiring process for an entry-level position shouldn’t look anything like the system for hiring a C-level executive.
3. Keep Your Job Postings and Descriptions Updated
Most of the time, it’s fairly obvious to candidates when they’re reading a job description that’s never been updated. It looks old. It sounds old. This is a poor reflection of the company!
Furthermore, if you’re posting a job online to replace a person who was with the company for five years, you should not use the same job description that you used to hire them. It’s five years old, and you can also probably improve it significantly based on the learnings of the person leaving and how that role has evolved over time.
Finally, updating job postings and descriptions is beneficial because it gives you the opportunity to better optimize the post with relevant keywords (which we call search engine optimization, or SEO). This is going to make it easier for the right candidates to find you.
4. Negotiate but Don’t Haggle
Expect to negotiate with the candidate. Try not to take it personally or get offended if they don’t accept your first offer. However, there should still be boundaries.
If a candidate comes back with a perfectly justified reason to ask for more money, you should consider it. But there are two scenarios that should cause you to pause.
- They’re asking for significantly more, which means that you are not on the same page, and they might not be the right fit.
- They’re trying to squeeze every last dime out of you that they possibly can by simply seeing how high you’ll go. This is often a red flag.
And remember, negotiating doesn’t have to mean increasing their base salary. You can always try to meet halfway by offering them more PTO or more shares in the company.
5. Give a Timeline for Accepting Your Offer
Understandably, candidates might ask for time to consider your offer. Maybe they need to speak with their partner. Or perhaps they’re interviewing with another company and want to give them time to make an offer.
Giving them a little time is the right thing to do. However, you can’t wait forever. Offering someone a job is akin to asking them to marry you. If their response is, “I need to think about it,” you don’t want to sit around waiting for too long.
So, put a deadline on it! Gently tell them that you’ll need an answer within (for example) 72 hours.
Another technique my team and I have been testing that’s been working well is, rather than making a traditional offer, first, we’ll say something like, “If we were to offer you X, would you Y?” For example, you might say, “If we offered you a base pay of $90,000 and unlimited paid PTO, would you accept?” With this approach, we sometimes have candidates accepting the position on the spot. It lights a fire under them and they don’t need time to think about it.
When it comes to figuring out how to hire and interview new employees, there is definitely a learning curve. You will make mistakes along the way, and that’s okay. But my goal is to help you avoid as many of those mistakes as possible! Recently, I sat down with Megan Couch, Chief Experience Officer of Integrity Staffing Solutions, for my YouTube series Crash CEO School. She is an expert when it comes to growing your team.
Want to listen in on the full conversation? Check it out below, and don’t forget to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel! Questions? Drop me a comment under the video.
