Crucial Mistakes

Crucial and Costly Mistakes Many Business Owners Make When Hiring

Straight from the NEW BOOK, How to Hire the Best: The Contractor's Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees!

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.

Mistake #1

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. 

The next time you find yourself getting ready to hire, answer these questions:

  • 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?

Mistake #2

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.

If you are looking for more relatable stories and want to find out the BEST hiring (and retention) strategies, be sure to CHECK OUT THE NEW BOOK! How to Hire the Best: The Contractor's Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Employees
 

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About The Author

Dr. Sabrina Starling, The Business Psychologist and international best-selling author of the How to Hire the Best series and The 4 Week Vacation™, is the founder of Tap the Potential and host of the Profit by Design podcast. At Tap the Potential, we work to free business owners from the constant demands of a growing business.

We believe work supports life, not the other way around. Clients in our Better Business, Better Life coaching program have more time for what matters most and more money in their bank account than they’ve ever had. Next, we send them off on a 4 Week Vacation™ to celebrate their hard-earned journey to take their life back!

Dr. Sabrina and her team at Tap the Potential are on a mission to change the story of entrepreneurship from one of long hours, grinding it out, to one of sustainably profitable businesses that support and enhance life. The Tap the Potential Solution™ and our Tap the Potential Family of Business Owners are disrupting small business as usual. We are on our way to making the Tap the Potential Solution™ the mainstream model for growing business.

By 2023, 150 Tap the Potential clients will have taken 4 Week Vacations. These are the trailblazers, role modeling what’s possible for entrepreneurs. In many entrepreneurial circles, it is becoming more and more common for one entrepreneur to ask another, “Have you taken a 4 Week Vacation™?” (as opposed to asking “How many employees do you have?” or “What is your annual revenue?”). Taking a fully unplugged 4 Week Vacation is rapidly becoming the recognized symbol of entrepreneurial success.

Never one to accept the status quo or back down from a challenge, Dr. Sabrina’s How to Hire the Best series grew from her desire to solve the toughest hiring challenges interfering with her clients’ growth and profitability. What sprang from her experience working with entrepreneurs in rural areas catapulted her into becoming the world’s leading expert in attracting top talent in small businesses—no matter what hiring challenges those businesses are facing—and earned Tap the Potential’s reputation as the go-to resource for entrepreneurs committed to creating Great Places to Work with thriving coaching cultures and highly engaged team members working from strengths.

As The Business Psychologist, and with her years of driving profit in small businesses, Dr. Sabrina knows what it takes to find, keep, and motivate exceptional performance out of your biggest investment—team members.