You may spend weeks, or even months, trying to find a new member for your team. Finally, after pouring untold time and effort into creating job adverts and interviewing candidates, you find the person who seems like a good fit…

Within a few days, you can see this new person isn’t the right one for the job. They’re not meshing with your culture and they’re not adopting your process.

That means you’re back to the drawing board. Only now, you’ve wasted valuable time and money on the poor recruit. And that means your business hasn’t taken any steps towards the growth that you hired for in the first place.

Sound familiar?

Recruitment processes vary, and there’s plenty of advice out there. A lot of it comes down to structuring your interviews in a particular way. The thing about holding job interviews is that it’s a poor predictor of performance and not a good way to decide if you want to employ someone.

Unfortunately, it’s probably about the best process we have.

As a result, it almost feels like you’ve entered a relationship without really thinking it through. The physical attractions there and you have those butterflies in your stomach. But as you get to know the person, the spark soon fizzles when you find they’re not the right one for you.

 

We’ve probably all sat across from a candidate and had this feeling that they’re the right person for the job. Your gut tells you that they’re the right choice and you bring them onboard.

Now, listening to your gut feeling isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But, relying on it alone to make hires is.

And that’s the mistake that I see a lot of business owners make. That good gut feeling can also prevent you from exploring what the candidate brings to the business. For example, the candidate may make an amazing first impression. They’re giving out all of the right messages and they look the part. But do they have the skills needed to fulfil the role? Is this a trainable person who’s going to adapt to the frameworks you’ve built into the business? Will your team get along with this person? Those are all questions that you need to ask yourself before committing to the hire. Gut feeling alone is not a reason to bring somebody on board. Make sure your interview questions explore the person’s values as well. Are they a long-term cultural fit for your office?

This is an understandable mistake, especially if you’re hiring to replace a former team member. You need somebody to fill the role quickly because not having that person slows the business down, and this affects profits. That means you start cutting corners and don’t conduct the search as thoroughly as you should. As a result, you miss out on the red flags that would normally tell you the candidate isn’t the right person.

The problem is that you’re hiring out of necessity.

But the reality is that recruitment is an ongoing process in your business. In fact, I recommend dedicating about 10% of your week as a leader to make sure you get that process right. When you treat recruitment as an ongoing process, it allows you to create a clean, strategic plan. With a proper plan in place, you’re not going to find yourself scrambling to make a hire when somebody leaves. Instead, you’re going to have people in the pipeline that you can call on.

When you hire too quickly, there’s every possibility that you’ve overlooked something critical – potentially a dealbreaker. Don’t do it. After all, somebody to marry you on the first date. Just like with dating, you have to take your time and establish the connection before you move forward.

The first 90 days that a new person spends inside your business are absolutely critical. Yet time and time again, I see business owners who don’t have a set onboarding process. It’s just a “make it up as you go along”, unstructured on-the-job training process that you hope is going to get your candidate up to the level you need.

But it’s terribly inefficient and hopeful at best.

You need to have a plan in place so that your new hire can show you what they can do in those first 90 days.

Here’s an example of what happens when you don’t have that plan.

A few months ago, I worked with a client who had a potential new agent in mind. This candidate told my client that they had previous experience with prospecting. It only took a couple of questions for me to see that the candidate had limited experience around prospecting, but my client hired them anyway. Worse yet, that agent came at a huge salary cost to my client based on the candidate’s supposed experience. Four months down the track, the new agent wasn’t with the business anymore. My client had found out the hard (and by hard, I mean expensive) way that the person didn’t have the skills.

That’s four months of salary paid, for zero return. And they’re back to square one, trying to recruit yet again.

If they’d built their plan for the first 90 days, with structured milestones, they’d have diagnosed the deficiencies in the new hire much, much earlier and been able to take corrective action more quickly, saving them tens of thousands of dollars. Inside our ’18 Months To Success’ playbook we have a three staged system over 18 months for each new recruit to follow that allows everyone to be crystal clear on the daily and weekly plan.

The key takeaway from this is that recruiting is a process that you need to build into your business.

Think of it like building a relationship. You need to know your “type” and you need to be sure that there’s substance lying behind whatever attracts you to your new agent.

You also have to recognise that gut feeling alone doesn’t lead to a good agent. To recruit well, you’ve got to take your time and learn as much as you can about your candidates. Beyond that, you also have to plan for the first 90 days of any new agent.

Finally, never expect the magic pill to come down the pipeline. The wonder hire who’ll make an instant impact just doesn’t exist.

Remember all of that and you’ll avoid these key mistakes.