Hiring to Grow
Almost every owner of a business wants to grow their business. Growing a business requires numerous tools, but the most important tool is a good, quality workforce. The first step in building that workforce is to hire the best individuals you can find. This means finding not only the best individuals but the best people that will help grow your business.
The first step in the process for hiring the right people is to develop a process that when properly worked will provide you with those right people. Your process should include a complete job description for each position, a flow chart showing how your systems flow and who reports to whom, etc. There are several important basic issues that you need to address when preparing your process to hire the right people.
First, identify the key positions in your growth plan. These are the positions that have the potential for the biggest impact on your growth plan. A good hire in these positions can help motivate others and even make a mediocre team perform at a higher level. Typically, these key positions are your managers, supervisors and team leaders. Their pay and benefit plan must not only be competitive, but also motivate them to deliver the results the company needs to grow.
Second, you need to adopt the practice of “casting your hiring net” on a regular basis. This means you put out the word that you are looking even when you are not. Two really good results can flow from this approach. One is that you will find someone that is better than the person you currently have in a position. Upgrading your work force when you don’t have to is a step toward taking your business to another level of competitiveness. Secondly, because you are active in the hiring environment you will build and strengthen the pipelines from the labor pool back to your company. Therefore, when you really need to say replace someone you will have a stronger and more responsive process to work with.
Third and perhaps the easiest step is to implement an evaluation system that you use consistently review your individual workers. When evaluating individual workers, you should also be developing a general picture of the quality of your overall workforce. Issues such as how is the work force progressing as a competitive team should be evaluated. This feedback offers the company a chance to review its current job positions as well as job descriptions. When necessary the positions and or descriptions can be rewritten to make them stronger and more effective. In turn, when you interview for these positions you will be using a different guidance offered by the rewrites and therefore be able to potentially make a more effective hire.
Finally, a company should always be attractive to potential hires. This starts with the workplace itself. Appearance and quality of your tools and fixtures says a lot about the company itself. Also, don’t forget your website and its appearance, accuracy and ease of use. Prospective employees as well as prospective customers typically go to the website for their first impressions of who you are. Really good people look for the best place to work and appearances often give them the first impression of what a company would be like to work for.
Hiring employees who are good for growth is really a bit different than just hiring any old employee. The key is to know what you are looking for, regularly casting your net in the right labor pools, and be constantly testing and adjusting your current labor situation to make sure you are getting all you can from it. Growing your business requires that you grow not just the numbers of employees but the quality of them as well.
If you have questions or comments then please email me at [email protected]
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