When your business grows, naturally one of the first things you usually look to do is hire more staff members. Unfortunately, the hiring process can be a long one, and when you're the founder or leader of a thriving business, bringing on new team members may not be the highest task on your priority list. And when you don't have enough time, you may end up rushing the process, which can come with a whole host of other problems.
When you’re getting ready to hire new employees, look for guidance from those who have been there—and succeeded. Thirteen expert businesswomen of Young Entrepreneur Council share the difficulties they’ve faced when hiring staff and offer their advice for how to overcome them.
1. Being Systematic In Your Approach
The key to finding great talent is being thorough and systematic about your approach to finding and interviewing candidates. We've implemented a very in-depth process to find great candidates: First, email screen with a questionnaire, then a 45- to 60-minute interview with a manager. Next is a 30-minute interview with the company CEO, then several 15-minute interviews with other team members via Google Hangouts. From there, our team will vote on the top one or two candidates. We then assign a small, paid task to the top two candidates and evaluate the results. This is a long, time-consuming and involved process that guarantees we find top talent that is not only extremely qualified, but that fits well with all of our team members and needs. - Marcela De Vivo, Brilliance
2. Finding Helpful References
We make reference calls for finalist candidates. Like in-person interviews, the time we take to make reference calls should be optimized to learn as much as possible about the candidate. Rarely will a reference say "no" when you ask them if the candidate is good at a particular job. One of the questions I found to be helpful to ask instead is, "If you started a new company, what would you hire the candidate to do?" This allows the reference to share what kind of position they think the candidate is best for without making the comment seem negative. If I'm hiring the candidate for a sales position and the reference answers my question saying they would hire the person to do operations, then I know the reference wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the candidate's sales skills. - Nanxi Liu, Enplug
3. Removing Yourself From The Process
When I started my company, I personally interviewed and hired every single person. Even as we grew larger I continued to stay 100% involved from start to finish. After opening the third large location of my studios, I realized that I had become a bottleneck for hiring and that I couldn't keep pace with the company's rapidly growing needs. While it was scary at first, I took the step and delegated our hiring process to a team of trusted employees. Now we are able to interview, hire, train and onboard new hires so much faster than I could when I was trying to do it alone. The greatest chokehold on the growth of any business is the owner's psychology, and I finally learned to step out of the way. - Rachel Beider, PRESS Modern Massage
4. Finding Someone Who Fits
The biggest challenge I have encountered in hiring new staff is finding outgoing accountants who can communicate efficiently and are proactive! To overcome it, we changed our job description and the wording in our ad to attract the type of person we were looking for. We then made sure that they fit our culture by giving them a behavioral assessment. I hire people who already fit my culture and don’t aim to change who my employees are. I simply want to hire great people who align with my values and then I give them an awesome place to work. I ask 20 questions over an hour interview and it really helps me to get to know my future employees and turn away the ones that I know won’t be a good fit for my firm. - Jennifer A Barnes, Optima Office, LLC
5. Looking Past The Interview
It's really hard to judge someone in an interview, and my team is super picky with incredibly high expectations—too high to judge in an hour. So, I found two ways to help. The first is I have every candidate complete a writing exercise: Explain this challenge to a client in an email. This shows us how well they can explain something in a succinct and thoughtful manner. The second is a tried and true trial process. New hires have 90 days to show us they can do the work and work well with the team. They are monitored closely and either a full-time offer with benefits is extended or we part ways. We've had people underwhelm us in an interview and wow us in their day-to-day output. - Kerry Guard, MKG Marketing
6. Knowing Who The Applicant Really Is
I learned that most of the applicants answer based on what books or YouTube taught them to do. Only a few are sincere and even less will tell you the real deal. I hired someone to spend time in hiring and ask in-depth questions that will help us know who the applicant is and how fit he or she is for the current job post. Everyone may be perfect and skillful, but not everyone is perfect for the company. We choose people who are aligned with our company's vision and mission. We ask random questions and talk heart to heart to see the motivation of each applicant. On the other hand, we also spend time with background checks and character references of the applicant. We compare his or her answers on his or her social media pages and the people he or she worked with. We take time, making sure we get a gold. - Daisy Jing, Banish
7. Attracting The Wrong Hires
Early on in our company we made a huge hiring mistake that I hope others can learn from. Our job descriptions and hiring promotional material touted all of our awesome perks like unlimited PTO, flexibility in working from home, fun office environments and team bonding events. While we thought this was a great way to attract awesome people, it ended up attracting people who only wanted to work at Influence & Co. for the perks and not for the actual work that they would be doing. We quickly realized this and changed our recruiting to focus on what you'd be doing in the role. In the interview, we asked deeper questions to find out why someone was excited about the type of work, not just working for the company and ended up with people who were better long-term fits for the company. - Kelsey Raymond, Influence & Co.
8. Checking Bias
We train people on how to hire inclusively, and we've been growing our team so we do our best to practice what we preach. Hiring is hands down one of the most challenging parts of our business, because bias is real. Like all founders, we have a lot of needs and when we're able to hire, we want to do it quickly. We know, however, that hiring quickly can lead to more bias in the hiring process, so we intentionally slow down by having a process in place. Being thoughtful about the words we choose in our job descriptions, checking our biases when reviewing resumes, having a structure in place when conducting interviews and having structure in place when selecting candidates to move forward helps tremendously, as does revisiting our process on a regular basis. - Rachel Murray, She Geeks Out
9. Reaching Out To Candidates
In today's tight job market, you can't expect candidates to just show up at your door. We do a tremendous amount of outreach to potential candidates to fill our pipeline, which can be time-consuming and somewhat frustrating. To increase accountability and keep things fun, our team established a weekly report that summarizes outbound outreach by hiring manager. The report is color-coded to make it easy to spot blockers or strong performance, creating a friendly sense of competition and keeping us honest when the pipeline softens a bit. - Emily Bernard, PlacePass
10. Finding People As Passionate As You
I was a solopreneur for 10 years. I was terrified about making a mistake once I started to build a team. The biggest difficulty I found is finding women who are as passionate and dedicated to the business as I am. My breakthrough came when I looked to my own clients—individuals who had used my services and had great success, women who were obsessed with the same vision. I cut my training time to a third because they already knew the business and they knew the client's perspective. Not only did they become a dynamic team, but they gave me vital feedback to make our programs even better. - Sara Connell, Sara Connell Coaching Corporation
11. Holding Out For The Right Person
One of the biggest challenges that we've faced when hiring is the pressure to find someone to fill a role quickly. This has often led to us making rushed decisions and not holding out until we find the right person for the role. It's especially difficult when you've spent weeks or months putting candidates through the hiring process, holding interviews and you feel like you need to make a selection by the end. To overcome the "pressure to hire" we've allowed ourselves to keep job applications open longer and to essentially have a rolling hiring process. That way it doesn't feel like a failure if we don't hire anyone—we're just waiting for the right person to come along! The right hire is worth the wait. - Nathalie Lussier, AccessAlly
12. Cutting Past The Lies
There are a lot of people who seem like great candidates at first but really are just masters of a great speech. They are probably more suited to sales than anything, but even then the best way is to offer a simple test as part of the hiring process. If they do a diligent job of completing it, then it's likely that this is the right hire. Just don't make it more than 30 minutes worth of work. - Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.
13. Finding Remote Talent
As a remote company, one of our biggest difficulties is finding remote workers online and finding them quickly. Posting a job ad will get us a lot of responses, but you then have to sift through those applications to find the good ones. Instead of doing that, sometimes we like to reach out to star potential candidates directly. However, we also can't spend hours searching for them on the internet. So, LinkedIn's new remote job search has helped us a lot. With this tool we can quickly find awesome candidates that are actively looking for a remote position. - Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
