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Hiring the right people for your business
As a business owner there will likely come a time when you need to hire people. Whether you’re making the move from sole trader to employer, or you’re adding to a larger existing team – hiring the right people can be critical to your operation.
Recruiting can be incredibly difficult, especially when you’re having to make a decision based on a summary of someone’s skills and experience and on that quick first impression you get during an unrepresentative interview process.
Decisions on who to employ often come down to a number of factors, most notably skills and experience. Obviously, you want someone who is qualified for the role and meets a set of criteria you have defined to be able to fulfil that role successfully.
But it’s important to also look beyond that. Qualifications and skills are not everything. Personality traits such as creativity, diligence, positive thinking, dogged determination, customer empathy and tenacity can all be key factors in finding the right person for the job.
Start by analysing yourself and your team
A lot of hiring decisions often come down to ‘gut instinct’, which people might refer to as ‘the face fits’.
Especially in a small business, a business owner might be inclined to lean towards someone similar to them, who has the same ethos and cultural values as they do and someone they could see themselves easily working alongside day-to-day.
However, is this necessarily best for business?
While it is important to get a feel for how someone will fit into your team and work with others, it could be that what your business really needs is a personality trait that’s currently missing.
For example, if you, or your team, is currently made up of highly diligent people who pay a lot of attention to detail and are very grounded and focused on the day-to-day, who is the visionary? Who’s throwing the big aspirational ideas into the mix?
Perhaps your team is lacking someone with a creative flair, or perhaps you and your team are so creative and full of ideas that you don’t actually see anything through and you therefore need an executor who can identify the workable ideas and bring them to fruition.
Maybe you’ve lost touch with the customer and need someone who can bring that empathy and understanding to the table.
A good place to start is by analysing yourself and any team members already in your business to identify the personality traits you possess. Armed with this knowledge, you can begin to explore what gaps there are. We use DiSC profiles for this.
Interviewing for ‘soft skills’ and personality traits
Once you know what you’re looking for, you can make sure potential candidates are assessed for their desired personality traits or soft skills as well as any ‘on paper’ qualifications they possess.
This means focusing on an emotional side of someone’s character, as well as the technical, finding out what makes them tick and how they feel about various situations.
You could do this by incorporating questions designed to find out how people feel about things. For example, ‘what makes it a good day at work’, ‘what makes it a bad day at work’, ‘tell us about the best project you’ve worked on and why it was so special’, ‘what do you like best about work or being part of a team’ and so on.
The main key to recruitment success is finding people who possess both the skills and personal attributes that will make them a genuinely valuable member of your team. This means understanding that this might involve selecting someone who you perhaps wouldn’t necessarily gravitate towards personally, but who does have the personality traits that your team is lacking.
For more information about hiring, DISC profiling, or to get other tips for building an effective team, contact Juliette Ryley ActionCoach.
