Are you hiring the right people?

How do you know?

Everywhere you look right now, there are stories about businesses struggling to hire new staff. And “I can’t find the right people,” is one of the most common complaints I hear as a business coach. Most small business owners that end up in coaching have one of two issues with their employees; it might be a struggle to hire the right people – or maybe they struggle to keep good people in the business. Either way the stress of hiring, firing, onboarding, training, and managing employees is a common problem that we deal with a lot. 

When it comes to hiring the right people, many business owners share this point of stress but few ever really figure out the best way to handle it. They run in circles, trying the same kinds of things over and over again, never really getting good results. Some owners try to delegate the hiring and training process completely to a manager or other staff member, but that rarely plays out the way they’d like. Others rely on recruiters to bring in the best possible employees, then wonder why they don’t get the right fit, and then they blame the recruiter. Sometimes an owner will find the “silver bullet solution” whether that is a personality test, one particular set of questions, or some other resource that they’re sure will solve their problem – but those solutions never really last. 

Many owners go through this cycle time and time again until they basically give up. They decide to keep the team as small as possible, do most of the work themselves, and hope that the exact right person finds them when they need to grow the company. As you can probably guess, things don’t usually play out that way either. So what is the answer?

The answer is building a business that doesn’t rely on individuals in order to be successful. While that might sound counterintuitive to some of you, hear me out. The only way you can be sure you are hiring the right people, and setting them up to deliver great results, is to build a business that doesn’t require one-in-a-lifetime superstars in order to accomplish what you’ve set out to accomplish. 

Most small business owners treat their employees as extensions of themselves – if they have a staff of six, they act as if they have six sets of arms attached to their own body. They want to know everything that is going on in the business, they want to see, touch, and taste everything that comes in or out, they want to feel like they’re doing six times the work without having to do it themselves. That kind of environment is NEVER going to be right for most people. Hiring people and expecting them to come in and work in those conditions is going to chase off most of the people you would want to stay, and then the people that do stay aren’t going to be able to deliver up to the standards that you’re expecting. And how could they? Treating an employee as nothing more than an extra set of hands and then expecting them to deliver the same quality of work that you’d do yourself is unfair to the employee and unfair to the business. No one will be successful that way.

If you want to be able to hire employees, bring them into the company successfully, train them and get them up to speed quickly, and ensure they are doing high quality work from start to finish, you need systems. Systems for hiring, systems for training, and systems for managing the work day-to-day. Without systems your business will continue with churn-and-burn employee turnover. Quickly hiring and painfully firing employees who aren’t up to snuff, and panicking every time a quality employee hands in their notice. It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Systems are the key

Business systems ensure that every employee knows what is expected of them, the result that they’re meant to deliver, and how they’re meant to do it. They have guidance and support when they need it, and know that if they follow the appropriate steps they can complete their work effectively and efficiently. Systems also help you keep your best people because they will feel supported, they will know they matter because they get positive feedback, and they will be able to take pride in producing the desired results of their work. Superstars are welcome, but they won’t have to carry the weight of the world on their backs – they can trust that the system will do a lot of the heavy lifting, which will allow them to deliver above and beyond your expectations.

Systems also allow the owner to begin to remove themselves from the day-to-day operations of the business. Clearing up more time to do more of the owner’s-level work, the 30,000 ft. thinking, the strategic planning. Having effective systems means owners don’t have to be watching over everyone’s shoulders to make sure the work is getting done the right way. Systems make hiring, onboarding, training, and managing much simpler and cleaner. Systems also make keeping top employees easier, and free the owner up to live their life more. While that sounds simple, it’s not easy to build out all of these systems. And as much as people might try to sell you on a “silver bullet solution” they don’t exist. EMyth does have some great resources to get you started on building employee management systems if you want to check them out here.

The real key to hiring great people is making sure your business doesn’t need six clones of the owner in order to be successful. Building a business that doesn’t rely on any one person to deliver great results isn’t easy, but it is absolutely worth it. So the next time you’re stressing about hiring the next person on your team, stop for a second first ask yourself “what systems so I need to use?” That will put you on the right path.

Want to learn more about building better business systems? Book a free coaching session today!