Thinking about hiring, we wanted to give you our 7 steps to hiring quality staff.
The first step is to think about the tasks you need help with. Maybe you need help with social media, customer service, general administration, or possibly sales support. If you aren’t sure, it is very hard to find someone who can help. Start with the end in mind and think about the top 3 things that if could be done but not by you, it would help. Let that be the starting point if your job description.
Once you have the tasks that you need, think about the traits that the ideal person to do the job would need to have. For example, if you want someone to answer the phones for customers, then having a pleasant phone voice and ability to communicate well is necessary. If you are hiring for an accounting position, then ability to be an accurate data entry person would be a requirement. You want to match the position with the personality and skills to ensure a good match.
Now that you have the tasks and the type of person you need, it is important to start recruiting. This is where it can get very confusing and expensive. You can certainly post your position on free job sites, but a lot of time you get a ton of spammy emails and then must wade through the junk to hopefully find a diamond. One of the reasons our clients love our services, is we do all the front-end work for you saving you tons of time and headache. We believe it far better to post an ad on a paid site so that you have better results. Remember that when posting for a position – your headline is your hook for getting people to read the full description so take some time to come up with something interesting.
Now you should have candidates applying for the position. How are you going to decide which to interview and which to eliminate? Again, depending on the position type, you may want to have specific criteria as a pre-screener. For example, if you are hiring for a customer service person who will be handling support via email, you may want to ask for a writing sample. If they are applying for a phone position, have them leave a voice mail so you can hear them. Make the task simple to do and easy to follow, but will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to make a yes/no decision. For a more complex position, I embed instructions into the middle of the post like in your cover letter, tell me your favorite animal and why. If they fail to provide a cover letter- next. If they provide a generic cover letter – next. That will significantly narrow down the prospects to those who can read and follow instructions well.
Once you have a shortlist of resumes, you will set up the interview. Interviews can be done via skype, phone, or in-person depending on the role you are hiring for. Have a set of questions you ask all the candidates and use what I call a tournament ranking system. Assign each candidate a starting rank based on their resume and credentials. Then rank them after each interview from highest to lowest. This allows you to objectively evaluate each on without being emotionally bias. Whoever has the highest score is the person for the position.
Now that you have selected the candidate and made the offer, your work isn’t done. You must have an onboarding process. What tasks are you going to train them on first? The best way to do this is to use the job description that you started with and work on the most important tasks first. We highly recommend having a screen capture software like Camtasia so that you can easily create a library of tasks that everyone on your team can reference.
Finally, how are they going to be measured for effectiveness? Every person wants to know what is expected of them and how they can self-evaluate their progress. Make sure that you have weekly meetings and feedback sessions in the beginning. After 90 days, you can reduce that to monthly as long as you are getting the results you need.
If you are looking to hire full-time staff, consider using our service. We provide top-notch, quality staff at a price that is easily affordable. Want to know more? Book a free consultation with us to learn more.