As outlined in the book, there are two major crucial mistakes that are not only avoidable but if not taken to heart can be detrimental to the growth of your business.

Typically, owners make a decision to hire, advertise for applicants, and start the selection process without enough consideration for how the position serves the business’ ideal client, how the position will be a profit center, and who the ideal candidate would be. 

• How does this position serve your ideal client (directly or indirectly)?

• In what ways can this position be turned into a profit center? (In other words, how can the person in this position make you money or save you more money than they cost you?)

• Imagine you have a top-performing employee in this position. What performance criteria will you hold that employee accountable to?

Rather than defining who their ideal candidate would be for a position, they hire based on choosing who is best out of those who applied. If the pool of applicants is rather small, this limits the qualifications. So, rather than defining who is the perfect candidate for each position in their business, owners often let random people (job ad respondents) establish hiring criteria.

Instead of letting applicants and existing warm-body team members establish your ideal team member expectations, take time to envision and create your ideal team member descriptions.

When you know who your ideal team member is, identifying A-Players is easier. Now you know what you want. Creating job descriptions, writing advertisements for openings, and describing who you are seeking when networking will all be easier. Each step in your recruitment process will attract your ideal team members.

Before we taught Mandy Wilkes an effective way to find exceptional team members, the process was quite a mess. She posted on multiple platforms and was overwhelmed with results that were hard to narrow down. By learning how to post a more effective job ad, she was able to weed out the candidates who weren’t exceptional team members. Here is how Mandy describes her experience:

“We posted on Craigslist, and we posted on Indeed, and we posted it on Monster, and gosh, LinkedIn, lots of different . . . oh, Facebook. Lots of different places, and basically, we’re flooded with every type of resumé from underqualified to extremely overqualified to someone that really didn’t have any of the skillset we were looking to people that wouldn’t really want this job. That takes an incredible amount of your day and life away because you’re just sifting through these trying to figure out who in the world that you can call. It was just a painful process.”

Being clear about the person you are seeking to hire will save you countless hours of your valuable time.