Jennifer Way offers solutions for hiring small business employees

Are you a small business owner or manager who struggles to hire the right people? At today’s lunch and learn, we talked about how to compete for top talent even as a small business. Spend your limited time and energy wisely by following these top 5 tips:

1. Spend your time on planning and screening. Carefully design the role around what you want as an outcome. Don’t build it around a person. Plan for who will be involved in the hiring process and block off time for your interviews. Review resumes and check for required skills, career progression, and holes in their timeline. Try to narrow it to the top 10 people and phone screen them to decide the 3-5 people you will interview. Focus on a few questions that will really help you decide who you should meet.

2. We hire people for skill, but we fire them for HOW they do the job. Use the resume to determine if someone has the right skills, the phone screen to narrow it down, and the interview to figure out HOW they do their work. Use behavioral based questions to focus on how they will perform. Will they keep their cool under pressure? Will they handle conflict with a customer appropriately? Most of the time, as long as you get someone who has the basic skills, you can teach them the rest. It’s a lot harder to teach the soft skills.

3. Interview them. Be cautious with casual conversation. You might be trying to get to know a person, but that can lead to inappropriate questions and raise issues related to age, nationality, family status, disabilities and more. Conduct behavioral based interviews, use questions like ‘tell me about a time when…’ or ask about their successes and failures. Be sure to ask how they handled that circumstance and what they might do differently if faced with that same situation today. This will allow you to gauge someone’s behavior and personality which is equally important to their specific skills.

4. Select the best person for the job. Ask the same questions to each candidate so when it comes time to select and hire one, you will have the same information on each which is easier for comparison and will help you make a better decision. Money is not the only motivator. Create a vision for what your company is trying to achieve. Use your culture, flexibility, the opportunity to do great work and other incentives to level the playing field.

5. You are the entrepreneur. It is your responsibility to manage the process and make sure you’re using your time wisely. Remember, don’t hire someone just like yourself. It may sound like a good idea, but this isn’t the time to make a friend, it’s the time to invest in someone with talents and skills that compliment yours to help you and your business succeed.

You are either creating or solving future problems when you hire someone new. Invest in your process and make sure you’re solving problems.

Click here for more information about Jen Way and Way Solutions. Also, stop by CoLab Nashville Wednesday, March 21st for our next Lunch and Learn with Lil Dragon Entertainment.