How to Hire Awesomeness: The Right Person for the Right Job the First Time

As your business moves from the start up to the second stage, you will find your business can only grow if you leverage yourself. That means you may need to add to your team.

Yet, hiring someone is one of the more tricky aspects of running a business. According to Forbes magazine, almost 46% of new hires fail within just 18 months.

While there is no perfect way to select a new member, many business owners make hiring decisions based on their gut feel. Your team is too important an investment to take that kind of hit-or-miss approach.

There are ways to improve the odds that your final selection of your new team member is the right one. One of the first steps that I recommend to my clients is to look at how the job functions.

Let’s assume you wanted to hire a receptionist or assistant. This is the first person your clients will speak to or see upon a call or visit. They are your company’s first impression.

They can make or break a relationship with your client. So, you want to make sure you have the best fit and that means assessing the position.

Most business owners often underestimate how their receptionist will function.

Will they:

• Be talking primarily by phone or have face-to-face contact?
• Juggle multiple tasks or process sequential information and data?
• Greet people as they arrive or take complaints all day?

For many business owners, they are missing something in their hiring process. What’s missing is often a way to decipher the type of environment a person best thrives. This can be determined by a person’s natural wiring.

Natural wiring can tell you how they

• Communicate,
• Process thought, and
• Are best motivated

If you hired someone who was naturally hardwired to want a variety of work in their environment and you hired them into a position of processing paperwork in a specific sequence the entire day, this would be draining for them. You would spend a lot of time, effort, and money training them only to have them leave in 90 days or less because they were bored. Other candidates, however, would thrive in this environment, in fact, be motivated by that kind of predictable environment.

Human hardwiring goes far deeper than what we learn by reading a resume or assessing from an interview. Understanding how your position functions and how a candidate is wired are essential puzzle pieces that, when put together, increase your odds of a successful hire.