Building a Productive Team

A company without a good hiring process is like riding around picking up random hitchhikers. You can't do either of those today because it's such a big risk. The first thing is you don't know who you're dealing with. And secondly, you have no idea how they can hurt you. Early in my entrepreneurial journey, I would hire mainly based on instinct.

Unfortunately, my instinct was only about 50% right? Often, about 50% of my hires were good, and some of them turned out to be rock stars. Unfortunately, the other 50% weren't so good. And some of those people turned out to be real nightmare. When I started employing these hiring processes, my ratio went up from to about 70 to 30 today.

I would say I'm about 75% good hires. And I'll tell you, that has a dramatic impact on the bottom line. You save time, you save money, and you save frustration. Here are some of the things that helped me weed out the wrong people when I created my hiring process. I began to actually call their personal and business references.

There was a time when I just didn't do it because I felt like they're only going to put down people that would give them glowing references. Today, you can scan social media. Social media will tell you a lot of things about how these people really are and what they're willing to show to the world. I strongly recommend you do two different interviews.

Oftentimes, I would interview somebody one time. I'd get a really good feel in form and I'd hire them on the spot. Now I interview two separate interviews. The first one to find out if they're right for the company. You can always use your core values or your guiding principles in your mission statement to ask questions to determine whether they're right for the company or not.

The next interview is about the role that we're hiring for the job that they're going to be in. Of course, you're going to want to ask questions to determine if they're right for that job. In addition to that, you may want to do some kind of skills test, whether you either make it up, it's some kind of project and you ask them to do it.

And you can do skills test to determine if they're right for the role or not. And finally, make sure that your process is very well documented and executed every time. You want to make sure that it's fair, it's consistent. And you're comparing apples to apples when you're looking at people rather than one person have one experience and then the next one have a different experience.

The key to it here is making sure that you have a hiring process that is fair to everybody. And even when somebody doesn't get the job they're going for, they become a fan of your company. And finally, you want to make sure that your high process is well documented, is followed by everybody and is really fair and consistent.

You don't want multiple candidates having different experiences when they get there. You really want this to be one of those things where whether they get the job or not, they leave you and they are fans of your company and the person you hire knows for sure that when you grow, your company grows.  Keep growing!