By: Ross Kimbarovsk, co-founded crowdSPRING, a Chicago-based online marketplace for custom logo design, web design, company naming and other design and writing services.
Business owners are justifiably terrified about hiring the wrong person. Bad hires undermine team morale, are expensive and can kill your company.
I'm very proud of the team we've built at crowdSPRING, but we made some bad hires along the way.
The really bad hires are easy and obvious. One of our first engineers
was late by an average of four hours in his first three days. We fixed
our mistake by terminating him.
Most bad hires are not so obvious, but they are incredibly costly.
There's an opportunity cost when you continue to employ someone who
isn't working well with the team. At a startup, the opportunity cost is
often the difference between success and failure.
How can you manage your fears so that you don't end up with mediocre employees? Here are the key insights I learned over the past 18 years:
1. Rushing the hiring process just to put a body in a chair.
When possible, do the job yourself before hiring someone, to help you understand the skills necessary.
When we were a young startup, we typically looked at the pool of
respondents and hired the best person. After a few years, I realized we
were compromising. After making a few hiring mistakes, we now hire only
when a candidate is the right fit for us. We've had hiring cycles where
after reviewing hundreds of applicants for a position, we elected not to
hire anyone.
We've also hired multiple people when looking for only a
single hire. Once you fully understand the job requirements, hire the
right person, not the best person from among those who responded.
To hire the best person from among many, you need to read tons of
resumes, do many phone interviews, and conduct at least five to 10
in-person interviews.
If you create standards that clearly define the right person for the
job, you'll know when you meet them, even if you've only interviewed one
or two people. Our most recent hire in customer service impressed us
with his creativity by writing and performing an original song as his cover letter and his references were glowing. We'd only interviewed two people for the job and he was the second one.
2. Hiring the best candidate.
It's become a cliché to say you should hire people smarter than you.
Most successful business owners strive to do so. But the smartest, most
skillful people are not always the right people for the job.
One of our biggest hiring mistakes as a young company was not paying
attention to cultural fit. You can teach skills, but you cannot teach
passion, a good work ethic and respect for the collaborative process.
When you add a lone ranger to an efficient and collaborative group, you
can undermine the entire team and the evolution of your company.
When interviewing, ask about the candidate's most and least favorite
projects. Compare the passion with which they describe each, the effort
they brought to each project and the results they achieved. Highly
effective employees will, naturally, be more passionate about projects
they loved, but they'll demonstrate a good deal of self-discipline
talking about projects they did not like and what they did to achieve
great results despite a lack of strong interest.
3. Committing to an employee before trying them out.
A number of years ago, after making a really bad hire and quickly fixing
our mistake, we decided we would not hire for any full-time position
without a short trial period first. Today we hire people on an initial
30-day contract. We pay them the equivalent of the full-time salaries
they would receive, but make it clear this is a test period for us to
see how they work with our team and for them to decide if they like
working with us. You can identify problems during those 30 days that you
never could have identified during a series of short interviews and
reference calls. If the problems are significant, you can choose not to
extend a full-time contract to that person. On the other hand, if a
candidate is an exceptional fit, you can extend a full-time contract
well before the 30-day trial period ends.
4. Not fixing your mistakes quickly.
Most business owners are uncomfortable when they must fire an employee.
But you do yourself and your team a disservice if you don't act quickly
when you realize you've made a mistake.
When I look back on some of our costliest early hiring mistakes, our
unwillingness to quickly terminate a poorly performing employee is at
the top of the list. A mediocre employee will not only cost you a lot of
money, but can damage the rest of your team.
The most compassionate act you can take when you realize you made a mistake is to be transparent and fix your mistake quickly.
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