Hiring the right talent is one of the most crucial elements of managing your business. When you want to grow and expand the skill set of your workforce, it’s vital that you hire the right people for the job. But that can be easier said than done.

Research shows that as little as 25% of hires and promotions turn out to be high performers. This means 75% of hires aren't delivering the performance their employer expects.

The team you assemble handles your customers, drives your internal processes, and upholds the values of your brand. Having the best possible support system behind you is key to the longevity of your company.

So, how do you supercharge your hiring process to guarantee a better success rate?

Here are our top 7 tips on hiring and keeping the team you want.

1) Don’t Rush

Give yourself ample time to deliberate the potential of your candidates. If you’ve backed yourself into a corner and are desperate for a new hire, then you aren’t going to find the best candidate. Like every other aspect of running a business, recruiting takes time and careful planning.

Instead of making a mad dash toward the first person through your door, allow yourself the time to make an informed decision. Develop a hiring plan to follow through with and ease the filtration process. With a hiring plan in place, you’ll be able to apply a consistent method and have a chance to get to know your prospects each time you’re ready to make a hire.

If you still aren’t finding the talent you need after your initial search, rather than hiring from the pool of less-than-appealing applicants, return to the drawing board. Maybe your job description could use a rewrite to become more specific and alluring to the people you are looking for. Maybe your job posting isn’t hitting the best sites. Think like a marketer and brainstorm the best verbiage and ad placements to draw in more talent.

2) Examine Resumes and References

One key area to focus on when going through resumes and interviews is gaps in the employment history.

Take a close look at any prospective employee’s career and check that there are no unexpected periods where they weren’t working. There may be completely innocent reasons for a gap in employment but, there may also be something more worrying hidden by this omission.

Dig into their history and ask the right questions about any gaps. Were they fired from a previous role? If so, why were they fired? And could that same behavior re-appear if you took them on in your own team?

If you’re starting to see question marks around a particular interviewee, it’s well worth getting in contact with their references. Get some much-needed first-hand feedback on your applicant's abilities and performance.

Beyond employment gaps, resume fluff is also something to be wary of. We have all seen the too-good-to-be-true resume beefed up and dressed to the nines only to meet the candidate and be let down by their now apparent exaggerations. One way to achieve the most honest depiction of your prospect is through a reference check.

Even just the ‘threat of a reference check’ (TORC) can serve to weed out those candidates who have been less than honest in their job applications. If an interviewee has boosted their experience, been untruthful about their qualifications, or given an unfair view of their abilities, a reference check will reveal the truth.

The mere threat of a reference check will often chase the undesirables away. Try it by placing a statement like this in the instructions to applicants: “An important part of our screening process includes having you make appointments with your references to speak with us about your qualifications.” A-players are proud of their record.

3) Search for Soft Skills

Soft skills are ever-growing in popularity as the job search evolves. While technical skills still hold priority, it is the innate personality traits that are becoming highly sought after in today’s job market. Employers are realizing more and more that operating machinery or plugging inventory on a spreadsheet are trainable actions. But, cultivating the right personalities to fit your clients’ needs and team culture would be near impossible.

Reflect on who had been previously successful in the role. What characteristics did that team member have? What made them a great fit, beyond simply accomplishing tasks. These are the traits you want to discover in your next hire.

But, uncovering these traits will take a little extra effort on your part. Be sure you line up provoking and introspective questions to help shed some light on their true personality. Give hypothetical scenarios, maybe based on real struggles your team has tackled prior. How would this applicant react in a similar situation?

Ask for a detailed description of their work style, what role they typically take in group projects, or for an example of when they helped a previous coworker in a bind.

Remember, hard skills are trainable skills. Soft skills are innate. You can train someone on your procedures, you can’t change their personality.

4) Energize Your Interviews

At this stage, you have conducted telephone interviews and chosen candidates to meet in-person. Now is the time to throw all your preconceived notions of what a job interview must look like out the window.

Don’t burden yourself with the same repetitive and boring list of interview questions we’ve all heard before. To identify the candidates who will bring more to the table than just the brains for the job, but also the culture-add and personality, you’re going to need to take the interview out of the conference room.

Walk candidates through the office for a chance to see how they interact with your other employees. As you introduce the interviewee to your team, study their behaviors. Do they seem genuine and excited about the position? Are they asking employees questions about their experience with the team? Does the candidate show an interest in what we do?

Sitting in a stuffy office chained to a desk recapping what is already included on the applicant’s resume won’t cut it anymore. Gauge their potential work performance on their interactions. When the interview has concluded, request feedback from those employees your candidate met. Get a sense of how your team feels about the applicant. After all, your team is who has to work with the new hire every day.

5) Invest in Your Managers

Managers tend to hire people who match their own level of ability. That being said, you need A-players at the top of your organization. A-players gravitate toward and hire other A-players. If a B or C-player carries out interviews, you won’t get A-grade hires.

Get involved. Have one of your top people shadow you during a hiring process. This guarantees the right outcome and a level of objectivity in future decision-making.

Make sure they’re up to speed on your preferred techniques. And that they understand the power of lengthy, detailed interviews. Once trained, your managers will be the A-players. They then can carry out interviews and hire their own team members.

6) Implement a Scorecard Approach

Very few businesses measure the effectiveness of their hiring processes. To be a top-grade business, you should be measuring the performance of your hired and promoted people. Checking whether they attain that A-player standard and maintain it.

If you do decide to hire a new team member, it’s extremely helpful to measure their performance once they’re in a role and working within the team.

Applying a scorecard approach instead of having an unchanging job description can be effective. The scorecard is solely for the team member being hired and it should be shared with the prospect. A-players want to know how the game is played. C-players are threatened by scorecards. By measuring the important aspects of your new hire’s role, you can track performance and see if they are achieving the A-class performance you need.

The elements you choose must be measurable, trackable, and built into the performance review process. For example, say you’re hiring an in-store salesperson. One indicator of success could be the number of customers greeted daily. Another could be the number of inquiries converted into sales. Or, the quality of customer feedback on this individual.

Very soon, you’ll know if you have an A-player on the team or a C-player who won’t make it through their probation period.

7) Cultivate Your Company Culture

Make sure that the high-quality standard is always in place. An A-player doesn’t see high quality as ‘outstanding performance’ they see it as ‘meeting the expected performance’.

Uphold your expectations with quarterly performance checks, maybe even monthly. These recurring meetings will keep you and your staff on the same page and develop a transparent dialogue between you two.

Within these monthly recaps include highlights of the team member’s performance. Did they work well on a task force? Did they land a new client? Are they receiving positive feedback from customers? And then give them notes on what should be improved upon. This balance is important to maintaining team morale and motivate your people to keep growing.

Remember to always ask what you can be doing to further support your team. Success is a group effort. This way you’ll be able to avoid potential chasms in communication or missteps in a procedure before they occur.

The Bottom Line

60% of business owners say hiring qualified employees is their biggest challenge. Get it wrong, and you have a disappointing workforce of C-players who miss goals and deliver sub-standard results. But get it right, and you’ll have a team of high-achieving A-players who have the skills, drive, and ambition to take your company to the next level.

We recommend reading Bradford Smart’s book, Topgrading, 3rd Edition: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance, for more proven hiring techniques. Read it cover to cover before you make that next important hire.

Holden Moss CPAs is dedicated to aiding businesses in this difficult time. If you have any questions about starting your own business or are seeking coaching for an established business, give us a call at (919) 556-6216. You can also contact us via email at admin@holdenmoss.com. We look forward to working with you.

7 Tips on How to Hire and Keep Top Performers