Lesson 1 – Six Essential Steps of Hiring

Getting the Right People in Place

Your business is most likely your livelihood. It’s essential that you get the right people on board with you if you are going to succeed. You’ll want to make sure that you are bringing people into the right role, and that you don’t hire just anyone.

Six Essential Steps of Hiring

When you know you are stretching beyond your capacity, or you need some additional expertise, it could be time to grow your team! Here we will present a step by step process from thinking you may need someone, to bringing that person on board. Even someone who works in a sole proprietorship needs the support of others to keep their business running smoothly, so we encourage you to consider every aspect of this section.

Step 1: Determining That You Have a Position to Fill

Look at your organization with a long range view and review your goals for growth and development. This will help you to create and fill the right position, rather than creating a position that is perhaps serving you in the short term, but doesn’t give you the results that you intended.

Step 2: Doing Your Homework

Once you decide on the position to fill, you’ll need to create a position profile or job description so that you know the type of expertise you will need to recruit. This will put you through an exercise of determining what tasks can be completed by this person, and whether you will hire the person full time, part time, on contract, or as a consultant.

Step 3: Recruiting

This is the process of finding and attracting the people that you want. Whether you do this yourself or use the expertise of a recruiter, it’s important that you find the right people. In many cases, the people that you want to hire are already working. You’ll need to find a way to reach them specifically. The way that we recruit and hire has changed dramatically in the last several years; we don’t always advertise in the classified section of a newspaper anymore. Companies almost exclusively want e-mail and electronic submissions, but there are plenty of people who do not search the internet looking for work if they are happy in their job. You have to find them, rather than expect them to be looking for you. In a tight labor market, or when highly specialized skills are required, your ability to network, research, attract, and retain people becomes an essential skill.

Step 4: Selecting

The next step is to sort through your candidates and select the best candidate. Interviewing is the standard for determining if the person might be a good fit for your company. Formal testing helps to assert whether their claims of certain abilities and skills are valid, although there are legal issues that can arise if you use invalid tests. The other challenge to testing is that some people are really bad at writing tests, and you might pass on a candidate who could be a great fit for the company and has the ability to learn what is needed just because they do not test well. Reference checking, which is becoming more and more difficult due to privacy concerns, is still relied upon and necessary to validate a person’s work experience and their formal education.

Step 5: Offering

You know who you want, and in this stage you offer them the job. During this conversation, you need to have information gathered that includes the salary you are willing to offer and terms of employment (contracts the candidate will have to sign, benefit entitlement, vacation, hours of work, expectations of the job, etc.). You also need to know to what extent you are willing to negotiate the contract, since your candidate may have some ideas about what they are willing to agree to.

Step 6: Orientation and Onboarding

This is both the final step in the recruiting process and the first steps that the individual takes as a part of your organization. When employers do this badly, good people (whom they spent a lot of time and resources to find) leave the organization. Or worse, they wish they had left but continue to collect a paycheck from you while they keep their eyes open for new opportunities.

Be prepared for the new person before they start their new job, and then be ready to provide them with a welcome so that they start off on the right foot. This means that their workstations are ready (whether this is a cubicle, a position at a cash register, or the cab of a truck), people know they are coming, and that orientation forms are ready for them to sign.

People take from two to six weeks to decide whether they have made a good decision in starting a new job: your job is to engage their interest and commitment during the recruiting process, which might be well before they actually start work with you. If they arrive on the first day and cannot enter the building because they do not have an access pass, things are already off to a rocky start. The orientation period includes that critical first week or two the person is on the job, while they adapt to their new surroundings, and get familiar with their position and the team.

Onboarding is something we look at with a slightly longer lens than orientation. Onboarding is about the development of the individual’s career within the new environment. Depending on the job itself, it can take from six months to a year or more for someone to feel fully competent, which may include experiencing a full cycle of the business. Your responsibility in the onboarding process includes providing the newcomer with appropriate feedback, ensuring that they are developing the skills and expertise to succeed (which benefits your organization), and that they are engaged in the work they are doing.