MBA2185 Q&A Wednesday: How do I not hire the wrong person?

The all New five Year Business Boost from Comcast Business it's the certainty of a price lock for five years on qualifying Internet bundles plus the most reliable WI fi with their best equipment. And ask about a $500 prepaid card when you add two lines of mobile. The five year business boost only from Comcast Business Powering Possibilities ends 22226 new customers only one year contract required for guaranteed rate. Five year pricing applies to monthly service charge excluding taxes and fees. Best WI Fi based on Open Signal Awards USA Fixed Broadband Experience Report May 2025 Ready to Save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA show. The place to be to build a business you want every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Eduardo and Eduardo asks, hey Omar, I've been having some trouble hiring in my team. I have a team of five people and I need to make two more hires. But to get to the five people I have now, I actually hire 10. Half of the time when I hire someone it doesn't work out. My track record is not so great and I'm worried I'll do it again when we hire the next two candidates. My question to you is how do I not hire the wrong person? What are some tips that you can share with me to increase my likelihood of finding a great employee? Thanks so much Omar. Love the podcast. Appreciate your help. Eduardo, Solid question. Hiring is one of the hardest things to do as a business owner, but it's also the most critical thing because as you start scaling your business, recruitment is one of the skills you really need to master. Because if you hire the right people, if you get the right team members, they can build an amazing company for you. They can fulfill your vision and they can make things happen that you can't do alone. But if you get it wrong, you'll be wasting a lot of time, money and effort. And boy is it frustrating. So in today's lesson, I want to share with you some of the things I have done over the years to improve our hiring rate to find the right talent. Now, I don't get it right every single time, but at this point in my career, in my business, when we make the wrong hire, it's the exception to the rule. It's actually quite weird when we actually notice this, but it helps us refine the process that I'm going to share with you today. If you want to hire a players, people that are perfect for your team, your culture and what you want them to do, then keep on listening to today's episode. You won't regret it. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Sure you don't hire the wrong person when you're hiring a new team member, it's a is first recognizing the fact that you are responsible for making the wrong hires in the past. This is your responsibility as the company owner. Okay? The reason why this is so important is that you have to take ownership of this responsibility. You have to realize that if somebody didn't work out in your team, ultimately this is your fault. Ultimately, you let them into your team, right? You hired them. You made a decision to say, yes, this person is good enough to be part of my team. And once you own up to that, you realize, well, that means I have control and I can change the outcome. I can change the way I make hires and choose my candidates so that I don't make this mistake. But a lot of entrepreneurs, especially at the start of their career, they play the blame game. They say, oh, that person wasn't hardworking or they didn't care enough or they were less experienced or maybe they fibbed on their CV or their resume. That may Be all true, but it's not their responsibility to be chosen by you. You are responsible, right? You are responsible for letting them in to your company. And once I realized that in my career as an entrepreneur, I started to realize, okay, I have to take ownership of this and I got to take control of the whole process so I can have a better outcome. So once we get past that step. So the next thing that I recommend you focusing on when you're hiring a new team member for a new position or even an existing position that you have right now is to be crystal clear about what you're looking for. This is where a lot of people make a mistake. They have a job description that they post on job boards, but it's not very specific. It's actually quite generic. Some people just copy and paste other people's job posts and just change a few things and say, okay, that should get the person I want to. No. Your job advertisements on these job sites and even your own website is the leading factor of who you will attract. You need to make it crystal clear on your job description, who you're looking for, why they should apply, what it's like to work for you, what should they expect when they are employed by you? So take the time to write a job description that is specific and is specific to your business and your expectations. Basically your job description is to say, if you can do these things and you do them well, you're gonna have a job for life. At my company. A lot of people overcomplicate this. It doesn't have to be this five page essay of a job description, right? You can make it your own, you can keep it short, you can keep it specific, you can write it in layman's terms. You wanna make it casual or even show your personality, that's fine too. But don't make it generic. Don't make it vague or too general. Be specific about what you're looking for. For example, we're currently hiring some engineers. If you go to webinar ninja.com jobs you can see our job posts. We're very specific about what we expect from our engineers. You have to be a problem solver and enjoy solving difficult problems. If you don't enjoy solving difficult problems, you're going to hate working for us because that's what we're going to give you. And if you hate working for us, you're probably not going to do so well. And it's not just about skills, it's also about the culture and the way you work in your companies. For Example, in our company, we specifically say you have to be willing to communicate regularly, frequently, be able to jump on a video call, showing your face when needed. If you're not comfortable being on a video call, having your camera on to hash out a quick problem or to discuss something, don't apply. This is not the place for you. We will not make concessions. Okay? And if you think this is optional, then we're gonna have a hard time. So your job description is really, really important. Next tip. So at the end of our job descriptions, we have a link to an application. This application is a way for us to vet people before they even have a chance for an interview. And depending on the position, we will ask specific questions about their past, about their experiences, about what they love about their job, why they want to work specifically for us. We may even ask them to submit a video answering some of these questions so we can see the personality on camera. Now, not everybody's comfortable in photo video. We're not asking them to give a Oscar nominated performance here. We just want them to know that they're expected to communicate via video sometimes because we're a remote team and if they are not willing to do that, then they're probably not going to apply. So again, we're putting up some friction on purpose so that we can qualify candidates before we even have an interview. Forget about hiring them before we even talk to them in a meeting. Next, before we even have an interview, we check references. There's no point in us even having a conversation to see if we're a good fit or you're knowledgeable or you have the skills to do the job. All this is irrelevant. If your past employers can't recommend you, if you don't have a track record, I can't predict the future. People change, of course, but when it comes to hiring, the best indication of what's going to happen in the future is somebody's track record. What happened in the past, what they've already done. They're more likely to do it again if they've done it before. And I mean that in a positive way. Like if they are hardworking and they show up to work on time and they do their things properly and they have a good work ethic and they have a great attitude and they're a fast learner, there's a good chance that they'll do that at my place because they've done this before. So we asked the candidates to send us some of their professional references, somebody that we can contact, phone or email to ask about what Their experience was like working with you or for them. And we usually ask a supervisor or who their supervisor was at the time, a line manager of some sort. Now, we don't ask for their current manager because sometimes that's a little bit of an iffy situation. Maybe they don't want to tell their employer that they're looking for work. So we ask them to maybe give us references from other employers prior to their current job, once they pass that hurdle. Most of the work of qualifying this candidate and making sure that you have a pretty good chance this person is actually legit and good enough for your team and a good fit, I would say about 80% of the work is done now, if they've passed all that stuff, we have a culture interview. What does that mean? We have an interview just to see if they're a good fit for our team. And for us at Webinar Ninja is very simple. How do we feel after we have a conversation with them? Do we feel motivated? Do we feel positive? Do we feel more confident about them joining the team? Do we just enjoy their company? This is important because we're going to be working with them day in and day out, 8, 9, 10 hours a day, 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And not just us. Everybody else on the team is going to have to do the same thing. So it's important that they get along with everybody, that they're likable, that we want to spend time with them, that they're a good fit for our culture. Sometimes in these interviews, we meet people that are fine people, they're good people, but they're just not a good match for the rest of the team. And I'd be doing them a disservice as well as the rest of the teammates a disservice if I hired them. So we need to make sure that they are good fit culturally, and they share the same values as us. And we have five core values in our company that we want to make sure everybody has before we hire them. So if you haven't decided or written down the values of your company, I highly recommend you do it. It actually makes it really helpful when it's time to hire. So, for example, one of our values as a company is everybody on the team has to have a growth mindset, meaning that they're willing to learn and grow, because if we don't grow, if we all collectively don't grow, the company won't grow. So we ask questions to find out if they have that value. Once they pass that cultural and values type of interview, we move on to the technical interview where somebody in their department that we're hiring for will do the technical interview. So if they're an engineer or CTO will interview them. If they're our customer service agent, the customer service manager will interview them. You get the point. This is more of a technical interview where we basically test their skills. And usually in this interview, we get them to do some exercises, some questions they have to think about, maybe write down some things, maybe even answer some live customer support tickets. If they're a support agent, for example, they wouldn't be answering a real customer. But we present them similar questions and ask them to type their answer as if they're typing the answer in an email or a chat message. This is the only real way we can find out if they could do the job. Usually after all these steps, we have a good understanding if they're going to make it, if they're going to be a good person for the job. Now, even with all of this, in my experience, I have found that sometimes things get through the cracks. Sometimes we don't see everything. And that's why when we hire new team members, we have a three month, what we call probation period, which means it's three months where everybody, you can leave or we can say goodbye to you at any time. Sort of like a trial period. And a lot of times we over hire in the position, meaning we hire two or even three people instead of one because we want to see who would work the best in that position. Now, if all of them are great, fantastic. We've got a great set of employees and great redundancy in this area. But in my experience that rarely happen, especially if you hire two people. Usually one of them is going to really shine, the other one's not going to do so well. And because you have this trial period, you can have some evaluations, you can have some chats. If you could see some improvement, great. If you don't, no hard feelings. They know they are expecting this. If they don't perform well at Capella.

University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu.

To wrap Teddy's lesson, Hiring the right person is critical, right? So I like to tell myself and everybody on my team when we're hiring, take your time. We like to hire slowly because we don't want to fire, we want to make sure that we have the right person. But when we do have to fire, in my experience, it's never a slow process. It's usually very clear very quickly, and delaying it is kind of delaying the inevitable. And every time I have to do that, I say to myself, how can I prevent this from happening again and just refine again my hiring process? Because firing is not fun. It's one of the worst days of your year or month as a business owner. So even if it takes you a little bit longer to make the hire, it's better for your company in the long run. It's better for your team so they have stability. They don't feel that instability, people coming and going all the time. And it's better for you as a business owner feeling that you have some momentum. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. Thanks Eduardo, for asking this question. If you've got a question you want to ask, just like Eduardo did, just email me over at Omar100- MBA net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. If you love this show, make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app. Whether you're listening on SP or Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio, we're on every single podcast app. So go ahead and hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. Also, by doing so, you get access to our archive episodes, over 2100 business lessons in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the reasons why we rush hiring is because we feel like we have no time, right? I got all this other stuff I got to do. I got to put this job description together and vet and interview and ask questions. So two pieces of advice. Number one, 80% of the work of hiring is administrative work. Get an administrative assistant. Get a VA to help you out with the back and forth, the emails, pre screening, the checking, the references, all that kind of stuff. Number two, make time for it. This is important. This is your business. This is somebody who's going to come into your company and represent your business. Your baby will influence its outcome, influence its success. Put it in your calendar. Make time for it so you don't feel like you have to rush through it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Eduardo.