How To Hire The Good Employee
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If you're a smaller company, hiring excellent employees can be a much simpler task than for a larger company. Depending on the nature of your company, in its early phases you and your business partners alone may be able to do much of the work: for example, if you and two business partners are coding spreadsheet software in your spare bedroom, there's little need to hire an extra employee. At some point, however, you may want to take some of the burden of work off of yourself: maybe you don't want to spend the time updating the company webpage, or you want someone to write lengthy emails to your clients updating them on your progress.
There are enough unpleasant tasks associated with running your own business to make hiring employees an attractive option. Small businesses should beware, however, of hiring too many employees. Any employee you hire will need to be paid (unless you want extremely disgruntled and inefficient employees), and in the early phases of the business, an extra thousand dollars or two a month in employee salaries could mean the difference between profit and loss.
So make sure that you have a clear need before you create a position within your business, and if you can "double up" on positions, be sure to do so. It doesn't make sense to pay both a file clerk and a webmaster if you only have about ten hours a week of work for each of them: much better to hire a single office aid for twenty hours, assuming you can find someone with the right qualifications. Outsourcing is sometimes a feasible option for scenarios like this where a full-time employee is not needed. We won't get into hiring versus outsourcing here.
Once you know that you need employees, though, you have to go about finding good ones. Probably the best method for this is networking: someone you know will know someone else who would be ideal for the position. This has two major advantages: the employee will have a personal connection to your company (possibly including similar interests), and the employee will come recommended by people that you know and trust. This simplifies much of the guesswork involved in hiring, and gets you a good employee without having to spend any money in advertising for one.
A disadvantage, however, is that your pool of potential employees remains fairly small. You may get highly recommended employees, but they may not be a good match for your company in terms of their skills and attitudes. If you don't find anyone you like through personal networking, you can expand to other avenues of advertising for employees. This might include utilizing a storefront or office in a reasonably public location to put up a sign. If your business premises don't get a lot of foot traffic, however, you can advertise through flyer campaigns, classified ads, temp agencies, local universities or postings on job-related message boards for your location.
Whatever method you choose, it's important to remember a simple balancing act: the more distant you are from the applicant pool, the more applicants you'll get, but at the same time the less you'll be able to vouch for their abilities and character. So if you're looking for employees from a very large applicant pool, you'll want to have a rigorous application process. At the very minimum, be sure that you ask for a resume and hold at least one personal interview. At most, you might consider a detailed application or multiple interviews with all of your managers or business partners. The further an employee comes to get to you, the more you should concern yourself with his or her character,
skills, and probable performance.
When interviewing an employee, it's important not to privilege skills
and prior experience over character. Skills and experience will, to a
certain degree, vouch for character--if someone's had five years of
systems administrator experience for a start-up, it's likely that they can be relied on to do good work without much supervision--but for some
businesses, relevant experience is largely meaningless.
If you run a small store or restaurant, the difference between a skilled employee and an unskilled one is extremely small, and the difference between a motivated, serious employee and a bad-tempered dilettante is extremely large, in terms of customer service and meeting basic employee expectations. So your interview process should be designed to ferret out bad employees and to allow good ones to rise to the top of the applicant pool.
One hint for doing this: don't rely overmuch on questions directly related to employee expectations. If you ask questions like "Is it wrong
to steal from the company?" or "Is it important to be at work on time?", you're not going to be able to differentiate between people who have the right values and people who know how to lie effectively during a job interview. If you just ask questions about job performance, you run the real risk of hiring someone who sounds good in an interview, but who shows no interest in working once they're on your payroll.
Instead, ask questions about the prospective employee's life, sources of motivation, personal background, and future career goals. You want to
learn about your prospective employee as a person, not just as a functionary for your business. If you do this, you'll be able to sift
your applicant pool much more effectively in terms of character, and
you'll be able to staff your business with people who not only have the
right experience and skills, but who are personally invested in doing a
good job for you. That makes your company not only more effective in the
marketplace, but a better place to work for driven employees--and thus
you'll start to attract the kind of applicants you want to see.
At some point in time all businesses will be faced with the decision to expand and with that comes the task of hiring new faces. This can appear a daunting task but with a little bit of thought and planning it can be a fun rewarding experience that leads to new relationships. The goal is to hire the right people the first time around so that you can continue to focus on growing your business instead of getting rid of bad apples.
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