Avoiding Hiring Mistakes That Cost Your Business

A bad hire can cost not only tens of thousands of dollars in hard money, but also wasted time by your team, the people who trained the individual. They could commit fraud. They could do a whole bunch of things that ruin your reputation. A bad hire's ripple effects can go so far. You have no idea. That is why it is critical we invest time in our hiring process and we do everything we can to avoid bad hires. Now, look, there's no way to completely avoid bad hires, but I'm going to give you some tips today that you can use to make sure that you give yourself a much higher percentage, much higher likelihood of hiring someone who's not only going to come in and perform the role that you expect at a high level, but also stick with you for the long term. That's why today I'm going to break down our simple frameworks for how we go about doing that at Guru and for our customers. Thanks so much for joining me. My name is Matt Beatty. This is Culture and Compliance, where I break down complex topics related to human resources for small businesses in a much more simple way. So, let's look at hiring. Let's talk about how to avoid these bad hires. So, this all starts with Knowing who to hire. This is probably the first mistake I see companies make is that they think they're going to post a job description, then they're going to hire someone who has done that job before, and that individual could or should be successful in the role. When we market, we don't necessarily just put an ad out and hope that any customer comes to us. When we market, we take the time to put together a buyer persona. We have a specific customer. So, for example, at Guru, we work predominantly with companies with between 10 and 50 employees in white-collar industries like nonprofit, technology. We know who the buyers are based on the size of the organization. We know where they are. We know their pains, what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are. You have to know the same when you're looking for your new hire. Who is the employee persona for this role? Is it a recent college graduate? Is it someone with 5 years of experience coming from a large national competitor? Is it someone who— understanding not just their experience, but their demographic level, you know, where are they at in their career? Where do they live? Are they remote? Are they in office? Take some time to put together that employee persona and base it the same way you would. We have a great video on our YouTube channel about creating an employee persona. And take the time to invest in that first. Then that will help you to write everything else. So now I'm going to have a much easier time writing a job description. I'm going to have a much easier time knowing where to post the ads when I do go out and start looking for this individual. And this is a whole other topic altogether, but I highly suggest you recruit for these roles, don't hire. So that's another way to avoid bad hires is to look to actively recruit instead of simply posting a job and then just only taking the applicants that applied. Your best candidates tend to be passive candidates, people who aren't necessarily looking for a new role right now. But when you show up in their inbox, either on LinkedIn DMs or, you know, if you have a friend who can make an intro through a referral and you get their cell phone to text them, these are the people that help you to avoid bad hires because they're more proven. They're people that you're going out and you're recruiting and you're using your network to find these people. Instead of just taking whoever recently got fired or laid off and is looking for the next job. And look, let's not go down that tangent. I'm not saying all the people that apply are bad hires. That's not it. What I'm saying is you want to mix it up. You want to make sure that not only are you looking at those that apply, but you're also recruiting. All right. So first and foremost, we want to get that employee persona. We want to know who we are looking for. Like we said all the time here at Guru, if you have no target, you will hit it every time. Create a target. Make sure you know who you're looking for. Make sure that you invest that few minutes. That's a 30-minute exercise on the front end to develop that persona. Then next, we move into that job posting. And so, there's a big difference between a job posting and a job description. And when we make our job postings, we focus on outcomes. What are the outcomes that we expect from this role? Again, this will help us to avoid bad hires because we're going to know more who we're looking for. So, if I say, hey, at the end of 12 months, I want this person to be able to, you know, close $200,000 in new business, open up a new strategic partnership with 5 partners, and be able to run a sales process independently. Now I know how to, again, hire. What I'm posting for, what I'm interviewing, the questions I'm asking, I'm trying to determine if they have experience doing this or they've done things that lend themselves towards being able to do this. It doesn't always require direct experience, but we need to know if they've done things that have prepared them to achieve this. And then also now I can interview based on those outcomes. So if I'm trying to find somebody to close $200,000 in new business and they have no experience that's relevant to that, and I can easily uncover that in an interview instead of just going through my boilerplate questions, that's a fantastic win for me. So we take that, we have 1, 2, 3, 3 interviews, background check, reference check, and that's how we run our hiring process. We're a small business. We're not trying to put somebody through 8 interviews. We're not trying to make it last 90 days. I'm of the philosophy, I like to get my yeses and my nos quickly, and I want our candidates to be able to do the same thing. But what we do that's a little bit different in there is we make sure we're spending a lot of time with this individual. So, there's a great quote. I don't know who to attribute it to, and I got skewered online last time I brought this up. "Even a donkey can act like a thoroughbred for 3 interviews." And I love this quote because it tells you, hey, look, interviewing's not everything. We need to make sure that they have the experience. And then of course, I got, you know, a bunch of woke people in my comments telling me, "Oh, now you're referring to candidates as donkeys?" That ain't it, man. Get off it. The deal is you need to spend, the point of the comment is that you need to spend time with candidates. It's, you know, you're not going to get to know somebody in 2 hours, 1 hour, 45 minutes. I, you know, I know these small businesses that'll hire people on the spot, one interview, make them an offer for a critical role in their organization, and then wonder 3 months later, geez, what went wrong? Why isn't Susie knocking it out of the park? Well, geez, dude, you didn't spend any time with her. You don't really know anything about her. You wouldn't propose to somebody after the first date. This is a big deal. If somebody is coming into your organization, they make $50,000 to $100,000 a year or more. That is a long-term commitment. You're talking now hundreds of thousands of dollars decision that you're going to make in 45 minutes worth of research. It's pretty bad process, right? So make sure you invest the time into your hiring process to properly interview. And again, if you go to our 42 free HR templates on our website on Guru, we've got a bunch of interview templates and things like that out there and check out more of our videos where we break this down. All right, so we want to know who we're looking for. We want to have a good screening and interview process. We want to ideally be recruiting and hiring from the pool of candidates that apply to us. We want to make sure we expand that pool. But then next, we want to make sure that during onboarding, we're setting this individual up for success. The number of calls we get in a month at Guru that say, hey, I'm getting ready to fire Joe, getting ready to fire Susie, whatever the deal is, it almost always comes down to we start asking questions and realize, well, Joe or Susie weren't ever set up for success in the first place. Many small businesses expect that if they hire somebody with the experience, they're just going to come in, hit the ground running, and they're not going to have to train them or babysit them hardly at all. Well, that would be awesome, but that is never the case. It is incredibly rare for somebody to come in and be productive in the first 90 days without a regimented and formal training program and onboarding program. That's why onboarding is absolutely critical. You're going to want to make sure, again, now, if I've gone to these outcomes 12 months from now that I know this individual needs to be able to achieve to be successful, I can turn around and back into what's my training program to get there. We've got a great video on that on the channel as well. But again, if I've got those 3 outcomes, now I know, In order to be able to achieve those things at 12 months, I need to be able to do this at 6 months, this at 90 days, this at 60 days, this at 30 days. Now I can train to make sure that this individual is set up for success, and I can avoid bad hires by making sure I'm setting people up in an environment for success. So when we're trying to avoid bad hires, it's important to make sure we know who and what we're looking for. We spend enough time with them during the interviewing and screening process to adequately understand their ability to perform the role. It's important that we have the outcomes determined for what we expect of this role. What does a rock star look like 12 months from now so that we can set this individual up for success with a wonderful onboarding program? That's how you avoid bad hires. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you love this, make sure you hit subscribe. If you didn't love it, share it with a bunch of your friends, tell them how terrible it was and have them watch the entire thing too. Thanks so much for tuning in. I appreciate you. Take— see you next time.