Seeing your business grow is exciting. With all the hard work and time, you’ve put into growing the business the ability to see it manifest into success is incredibly rewarding. However, as the business grows so too will your need to expand along with it. Hiring on new employees becomes that much more important. But you don’t want to just hire on anyone who applies. Bringing in the wrong employees can prove detrimental and undermined everything you’ve done to grow the business. While you may have discovered how to scale a business fast, you’ll need to know how to hire the right team along with it.
1) Is Your Job Listing Accurate?
Go back over your job description before posting it to job sites and other platforms. Inaccuracies within the job listing will result in potentially the wrong applicants. Don’t try to oversell the job and yet do not include information that is false either. You need the job listing to be direct and to the point. Include exactly what you’re looking for and what you’re not.
Also, don’t try to combine multiple job listings into a single post in hopes of saving money. Make each job listing its own post to ensure the right candidates apply for the right position.
2) Aim To Hire Someone Better Than What You Already Have
You should never allow someone who works within the department to perform the hire. If each department looks to hire on their own employees there’s a good chance they bring in individuals who are not as capable as themselves. This is because there is always a survival tactic in the professional world. If someone perceives another as a possible threat they may not bring them on.
However, the entire purpose of hiring new talent is to get the best of the best. Not to hire someone who is equal or lesser to the person you already have.
Consider sporting teams. When an assistant coach moves on to take another job, the current head coach doesn’t look to just bring someone in who is almost as good as the previous individual. They want to hire someone better.
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You want employees who excel at doing their job and who are not afraid of competition. Competition makes everyone better. So always aim to hire on not just the best option but aim for someone who is better than what you currently have. If your current employees don’t like it, they can either improve their own productivity, or they will be forced to make way for the new hires.
In order to hire on the very best professionals and to keep departments from not bringing in the best workforce, you need to centralize the hiring process. In order words, either you need to be part of the hiring process, or you need to have a specific individual whose entire job is to hire on new talent. This way, they won’t have any problems with hiring the best talent to apply for your position.
3) Create a Successful Profile
Before you start looking for the right employee to fit in with your current team, create a “successful profile” candidate. This is someone who checks off all your boxes. This is no different from creating a profile for your target audience. Only instead of a customer, you’re creating it for your desired employee.
This way, flashy resumes or other credentials that are not essential to your job won’t distract you or pull you away from the right candidate.
4) Red Flag Potential
You don’t want to hire someone who might be detrimental to both your business and the other employees. This may quickly reduce the quality of work everyone puts in and bring the entire business tumbling down. It’s better to hire on someone who struggles with their own job than to bring on someone who affects everyone else.
Hiring a bad employee effects your entire business. According to Interact, a bad employee leads to a 41 percent loss in productivity, a 40 percent loss in time recruiting and a 22 percent negative impact on client solutions.
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Red flags in the hiring process do not mean poor credit history or even their criminal background. While you should keep these background checks in mind, a person’s credit check will not typically cause problems while working with your other employees.
Instead, the red flags you need to keep an eye out for include if they are arrogant during the hiring process if it is evident the only reason, they want the job is for the money, and if they are unprofessional and difficult during the interview.
When someone acts like they already know the job before they’ve worked a minute on the job it is a bad sign. You don’t want someone who is new to your company acting like they know more than what the current employees know. There is a difference between confidence and arrogance. It’s perfectly fine for an applicant to be confident in their skills. Once they become arrogant you need to be careful.
Should an applicant prove difficult and unprofessional during an interview there’s a good chance this will continue on after they start up with the job. Yes, they might be nervous during the interview, which can cause some people to become flustered, but you shouldn’t have any problem identifying the difference between nervousness and unprofessionalism.
Lastly, there is the money issue. Of course, the applicant is looking to work for you because of the money. They need money for their livelihood. However, if their only motivating factor is money, they will have no brand loyalty to your company and they will also jump ship as quickly as another job comes along. The last thing you want is to be forced to hire another employee just months after the initial hiring process.
5) Move on Desirable Candidates Quickly
When a candidate knocks it out of the park and you feel good about them, you need to act quickly. Because the fact of the matter is if you feel good about the candidate, chances are other potential employers feel the same as well. If you don’t move quickly on the applicant there’s a chance someone else will, which can leave you hanging as you miss out on the best fit for your job.
Do your best to contact applicants you are interested in sliding an offer across the table as soon as you’ve made a decision. Do not let it sit, as finishing second with the right candidate still means you did not land them. After all, if you’re looking at how to scale a business fast, the last thing you want to be is slow in the hiring process.
According to Hired, you should fill your job in under 30 days from receiving a suitable application, although you should act sooner if you find a winner.
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6) Hire for Your Needs (And Be Honest)
It is important to hire on employees who fill a specific need. As a small business, you’ve spent a good amount of your time multi-tasking and wearing several job titles. You may have been in charge of marketing, sales and customer relations, all at the same time.
Chances are you thrive at some of these jobs and at others you simply did it because you had to. Well as you focus on how to scale a service business you need to be completely honest with yourself and what you do well and what you need help with.
You may have been trained in business marketing, but you may have no idea how to handle customer service requests. Scaling a business is hard because many small business owners are not good at accepting their own flaws and weaknesses.
As long as you are completely open with what you do well and what can improve, you’ll know what to look for in potential hires.
7) Promote Your Job Listing Where Your Right Candidate Is Likely to Find it
You know the job and you have a profile for the perfect candidate. Just as you would with marketing toward your key demographic, you need to post job listings where your perfect employee is likely to find it. Whether this means publishing to local newspapers or even creating an advertisement for Instagram, the right candidate is critical to your company’s ability to grow.
According to Hueman (2018) indeed is the top job listing website. However, that doesn’t mean it is the best listing site for you. Consider the other options and the demographics of each.
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8) Consider Interns
The desire to bring on new employees is strong but consider whether or not this is a move you can afford just yet. Instead, you may want to train someone in your footsteps who can learn the business from the inside out. In this case, one of the best ways for how to scale a service business is to bring on an intern.
An intern may have the education but lack the on-job experience. However, many interns are eager to learn and to prove themselves. It is this eagerness that can help grow your business. You may discover as a startup many of the top applicants will avoid your company as you are not as soundly grounded in success. Although it is growing, they want to know the business will be around years from now.
So instead of hiring a middle of the pack employee who has reached their peak in performance potential, you may want to consider an intern as the right hiring move. Whether you’re looking at how to scale a manufacturing business or how to scale a construction business, there are college students out there with the education and who are looking at getting their foot in the door.
9) Define Your Culture
Scaling a business is hard. So, you want to know the best way to hire the right team member that will fit in with your current employees? Define the culture of your business. By defining the culture you’ll be able to identify the right employee candidates who can help you in your quest for how to scale online businesses to be successful.
This is something major companies understand (and why the companies remain in business for so long). According to PWC, 93% of CEOs say it is important the company has a strong purpose that is reflective in its cultural values.
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10) Bad Hires Happen
No matter what you do and how careful you are, bad hires will happen. So, don’t blame yourself too much for a poor hire. Look back at potential red flags that you looked past and adjust your hiring process accordingly. You’ll probably make more bad hires early on as you learn to refine the process. Learn from your mistakes and move on.
It is important for you to make amends for a bad hire quickly though. According to ShareAble For Hires, 35 percent of executives said a poor hire has a major impact on company morale.
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In Conclusion
To ensure your company continues with its successful scaling plan you’ll need to hire on the right professionals. Without the right talent at your disposal, you’ll end up harming your business and stunting potential future growth. By following these 10 keys to hiring the right team when you start scaling your business, you’ll have the ability to more often than not bring in the right professionals who will, in turn, assist in the continued growth and prosperity of your company.
