As leaders, we surprisingly struggle to pick the right people for our teams, which leaves us disappointed, frustrated and asking if we’ll ever get the help we need to grow our organization.
In this episode, we’ll discuss this issue with Brooke Cecil, BELAY’s Director of Client Relations.
Brooke and her team oversee our client experience. A large part of their role is matching more than one thousand executive assistants, bookkeepers, Social Media Managers and website specialists with business leaders all over the country with different needs and different situations.
She knows how to help business leaders identify the right fit for their team. And she’s here to share a few tips on how you can more effectively identify who’s right and wrong for your organization.
Here are some takeaways:
1. Don't just hire for hard skills.
You can teach hard skills – things like how to learn software, applications or tools. While those are important, even more important is the cultural fit and the soft skills.
Will your team like this person?
Are they easy to talk to?
What are their passions and how could those fit into the role you’re hiring for?
Do they care about your company and your mission?
If those questions can be answered without issues, then you can check a lot of boxes to make sure someone is the right hire.
2. Spend a lot of time on the job description.
This is so important. You want to make sure your job description fits the person you want to hire. Too many times, people think they need one thing, put it in the job description and then realize too late they need something else.
That’s why really thinking about what you need, what gaps you have, and what you can delegate is such an important part of the hiring process. If that step isn’t in place, then it will be really hard to find the right fit.
On BELAY job descriptions, we list all the things that we need this person to do in the day-to-day in terms of hard skills. But we also include soft skills of how they’re going to show up and represent our culture.
3. Be slow to hire and quick to fire.
A lot of companies use this mantra, and it’s great advice.
By taking your time in the hiring process, making sure you have talked to a diverse range of qualified candidates, and then intentionally weeding down the list, you’ll go a long way toward hiring quality team members.
Then, when it’s time to let someone go, don’t waste your time moving forward with the decision. That’s the best thing you can do for your organization and for the person you’re letting go.