Why Transforming Your Hiring Practices Gets Dramatic Growth

You probably wouldn’t dream of putting a sign in the front window of your business that says: “Now Hiring: Warm Bodies Apply Within.” Who you hire has an incredible impact on the success of your company. In spite of that, too many businesses look to satisfy “head counts” or to “fill seats.” You need to transform your hiring practices for dramatic growth.

A Business Parable

Let me illustrate with a simple business parable. It might be helpful to think of your business as a carriage—even like an elaborate royal coach such as the one you see here. You can spend a lot of time, money, and effort on your vision, on your strategy; on your infrastructure; and on your branding. Those are all good things. And you may end up with a great looking business—just like this great-looking carriage. But a great-looking carriage (by itself) doesn’t do anything. Carriages aren’t built just to look good. They have a purpose: They’re designed and built to comfortably transport people from one place to another. If you don’t have horses and a driver, the carriage just sits there (and all the people sitting in it look kind of foolish).

Of course, it’s important to have the right kind of horses attached to the carriage. Hooking a racehorse to a carriage is a poor choice. Just being fast doesn’t make a horse a good choice. In the same way, a plow horse may be strong, but it’s not an optimal choice either. What you really want are horses that have the skill and training to work together to provide a smooth ride.

I realize this is an imperfect illustration. I’m not suggesting that your employees are horses (or that you should treat them as such!). Your employees, however, are the force that drives your business forward. You do want employees with the skills and training (or at least the ability to learn) to take your business where you want it to go. And you want employees that work in concert with one another.

You Need to Be Strategic In Your Hiring

Hiring the right person isn’t just an activity. It’s not simply about plugging a person into a spot. It needs to be a strategic activity. It’s about getting the right person in the right position.

In business, we often look at skills, experience, likeability, and loyalty. Again, those are all good things, but you have to look deeper. Does your candidate have the right skills? Does he or she have the right experience? And while loyalty is a great attribute, it doesn’t mean someone is a good fit. If you’re serious about transforming your company—about changing the way it operates—you also need to transform the way you hire people. Hiring the same kind of people to do something different won’t give you the results you want.

Two Ways a Business Coach Can Help You With Hiring

It comes down to evaluating the suitability of your candidates. Resumes can be padded and tweaked to hide deficiencies. A candidate may present well, but may not actually be the right fit. And sometimes a candidate’s best attributes don’t show up on paper—or even in an interview. Here’s a post about having to dig a little deeper to find what you’re looking for — and it includes a real-life example I had with evaluating a potential hire that seemed to be perfect.

This is where a good business coach can really help—and here are two attributes of a good business coach that can make that happen.

Experience

There is simply no substitute for experience. An excellent business coach has experience as a result of working with a variety of different businesses—and helping them achieve their goals. Different companies have different needs when it comes to personnel. And a good business coach can help you look outside of your normal constraints when hiring key employees. If you really want to do things differently in your business a business coach can help you think outside the box and evaluate potential candidates.

Objectivity

Another advantage that a good business coach has in the hiring process is that he or she can be objective. He or she has no emotional attachments when it comes to evaluating personnel. A coach may be aware of internal politics within your company—but he or she doesn’t have to play those games.

Here’s a Hiring Resource

In their outstanding book, Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. Learn how to

• Avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods
• Define the outcomes you seek
• Generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople
• Ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate
• Attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most

Check out my Resources Page for additional books that can provide excellent advice about the hiring process.

How Do You Know That You Need to Hire?

You may not need more people. But you definitely need the right people. Too often business leaders (or their HR departments) focus on filling empty positions. But are your existing personnel capable of taking your business where you want to go? Have you evaluated your staff to see if they really fit your vision and goals?

Here’s a simple tool for assessing your people to find out. By clicking on the “Assess Your People” button, you can take a very short (2 minute) assessment of your key employees. It’s not comprehensive, but it can provide you with valuable insights to help you evaluate whether or not you’ve really got the right people working for you.