Why do weak employees come to work for you? And why recruiting agencies won’t help you
In the last article, we looked at what problems in business arise due to poor talent density. In this part, we propose to discuss what cockroaches in our heads prevent us from hiring talented employees on a timely basis. And at the same time, we’ll tell you what cockroaches need to be populated in your head in order to improve the situation.
Here are the most common reasons why the owner of a small and medium-sized business does not consider hiring as a tool for the growth of his company:
Investments in hiring will pay off for a long time
no money for new specialists
there are few worthy candidates on the market
You can understand whether an employee is normal only after 3-4 months (hiring is a pig in a poke), but I want to grow now
Let’s look at each of these reasons and show why these attitudes are preventing your business from growing.
Investments in hiring will pay off for a long time.
The first cockroach says that investments in hiring will pay off for a long time. And this is one of the main reasons why the owners put off expanding the team until their strength is exhausted.
Hiring looks like a long game. Vacancies take several months to fill, people take a long time to get into position, it takes even longer to produce results, and how their results affect money is unclear.
But these are problems only with your hiring system. If you do everything correctly, you will receive relevant applicants that fit your tasks within a week. And the first results from their work within 2 weeks from the start of hiring. And these results will already be much more useful to you than tons of test tasks.
Often the problem is that we use test tasks for selection (and they do not show the actual level of productivity), rather than precise, prescribed internships, within which each applicant gives results to the company and relieves the team.
If you are not designing internships in such a way as to recoup your costs of finding an employee and have a clear answer to the question of whether he is suitable for you or not, come to us at telegram channel. We are preparing materials for you on how to allow only strong employees into the company.
I don’t have money to hire.
The second cockroach whispers to the owner that he now has no money to hire. That good employees are expensive, it is not possible to pay that much money. When the company grows, then you can think about it.
And here we make a fundamental mistake.
Good employees really are worth a lot. But we mistakenly believe that we need to prepare a lot of money in advance to attract a talented employee. In fact, a good employee hired on time always pays off. This is what distinguishes him from the mediocre ones.
A GOOD EMPLOYEE ALWAYS PAYS OFF
We are often given the example of hiring a marketer. The owner says that marketers are not ready to guarantee results: marketing is a hypothesis, you need to go through a lot of them… And you have to wait six months to understand whether the hypothesis is working or not. And the marketer receives a salary all these months. And it doesn’t pay off at all.
Yes, it really takes time to achieve any result. But, firstly, it never happens all at once in one day.
Compare with any area where you are competent: in order to achieve the final result, you make a whole chain of mini-results. And it makes sense to design them so that the achievement of each has a positive impact on the bottom line of your company.
In addition, professionalism lies precisely in this: being able to notice the dynamics and correct it in time in the right direction, if necessary. Even if we are talking about testing hypotheses, there are always intermediate stages, conversions at them, by which we can notice whether we are moving in the right direction.
Professionalism is the ability to obtain predictable results.
And, if you hear from a marketer that marketing is a hypothesis, this is true. But the same truth is that he, as a specialist, must, firstly, ensure the survival of these hypotheses, and, secondly, achieve target indicators and pay for the tests, even if the hypotheses have to be changed along the way.
And this certainly does not mean that we should pay a high salary to an employee who does not produce the desired results, in the expectation that he will still give and pay off. Most likely, this will not happen. In this case, you need to check the likelihood of a hiring error: in most cases, the fact is that you hired a person who is not qualified to perform your tasks. Work with this.
Good employees know how to be responsible for results and have a positive impact on profits. They don’t ask for promotions just because they have pretty eyes. Good employees know what they need to do to earn more. And they definitely see the connection between the company’s well-being and their own.
So we dealt with the second cockroach. It turns out that you can hire talented employees even if you are a small business and do not have the margin of safety to experiment with hiring. In this sense, it is even more important for small businesses to be able to hire strong people.
There are few worthy candidates on the market
The third cockroach states that there are few worthy candidates on the market. More often than not, this is not the case.
In 95% of cases, when we were told that there were no smart people in the market, this turned out to be untrue. In fact, there are people. And we discussed the first problem, why the owner does not see them, in the previous article: the job description or the vacancy itself is unattractive, does not reach the market, and does not make talented employees want to respond.
But there is a second problem of the owner’s myopia. He simply does not always know how to distinguish talented employees from mediocre ones.
A talented employee clearly understands what results are expected from him and has a history of obtaining the results you need.
This is exactly what needs to be primarily checked during interviews: whether the employee understands what result is expected of him or not. And everything related to the psychological portrait, which is so favorite for us to check, we recommend postponing until the internship. And then check it out in practice.
In most cases, the picture is this: we try to predict some trends in people’s behavior by talking with them during an interview for half an hour. This leads to cases where candidates are asked questions that later become memes with a bad reputation. But the most important thing is that the answers to these questions do not provide a clear answer about how the employee will cope with the function that you want to delegate to him. Because of this, hiring becomes a lottery.
Without learning how to create a high-quality flow of applicants, you lower your own standards. And they are ready to hire at least someone just to fill the position. And then you complain that people are stupid, lack initiative and don’t want to work. It’s just that you hired them yourself.
You need to learn how to attract talented employees and identify them from the mediocre ones. And as soon as you master this skill, you will find that there are no stupid employees left as a phenomenon in your company, and there have been strong, talented, productive people on the market all this time. They just didn’t work for you.
So we dealt with the third cockroach. In fact, there are enough talented employees on the market; you need to learn how to attract them to the company and weed them out from the mediocre ones. The right hiring system allows you to fill the company with them.
You can understand whether an employee is normal only after 3-4 months
The fourth cockroach insists: “The first result from hiring can be obtained only after 3-4 months.”
This is a very long time.
The real problem is not that you have to wait so long to get the first results once a person gets used to it. The problem is that the system is not aimed at the maximum speed of obtaining results. There is no prescribed onboarding and onboarding, there is no process for transferring tasks from simple to complex to employees so that they relieve the team from the first day. There are no described regulations for a person to undergo adaptation smoothly and quickly.
And, just as important, there are no plans for a probationary period or internship, or specific results that a person must bring to the company in order for them to be considered successfully completed.
There is no need to set tasks for new employees, the results of which will be known only after 3 months.
Even if you have projects with a long implementation cycle, still set intermediate points, the results of which will be useful to the company. This way you will protect yourself from wasting money and time, get the first result within a week of the employee’s work, and stop listening to the fourth cockroach.
I don’t want to do the hiring, I delegate it to a recruiting agency
And for dessert, as a bonus to the main program – the last, most tenacious cockroach. The owner or top management of the company believes that they can delegate hiring to recruiting agencies and save themselves from unnecessary hassle.
Yes, for some employees you will have to pay 500k – 1 million rubles, but you won’t have to understand the details and waste time. I’ll just give the task to external professionals, but how will you understand that these are professionals? How can you explain to a recruiting agency who they need if you don’t know it yourself? How will you know that their job is done well until the tenth change at the position within a month?
You may ask: what, now you need to figure everything out? Life is not enough for this.
And we will answer you that if you want to grow, you need to figure out how to assemble a team. Understand what results you need from each specific employee. And understand whether a particular person can provide it for you.
And then your HR will be able to hire whoever you need. If you hired the right HR before this.
Having expertise inside is always more reliable. This way you will control what kind of employees work in your team.
Let’s summarize once again which cockroaches are correct and which are not.
Wrong cockroaches:
Investments in hiring will pay off only in six months
It takes a lot of money to hire talented employees
There are few worthy candidates on the market
The first result from a new employee can be obtained only after 3-4 months
Recruiting agencies will solve all problems for me
Correct cockroaches:
Investments in hiring pay off immediately
It’s even more important for small businesses to hire strong people
The right recruitment system allows you to find the most worthy candidates
You can get the first result from an employee after 1 week
Having expertise inside is always more reliable. Being able to assemble and manage a productive team is the key competency of every manager
Don’t wait until you’re big enough to hire great people for your team. Hire them now. After all, it’s great people who will make your company big enough.
But if you haven’t solved the problem of growing your business, then most likely you don’t know how to select great people. Subscribe to our telegram channelthere will be a big video coming out next week on how to do this.
