Steve Jobs said, “Hiring the best is your most important task.” Verne Harnish, author of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits (a must read), says you should hire so well, that one person should replace three people.
How much quality time do we put into finding the ideal person? Do we create a job specification with the same care we use to create a client advert? For example we often put a lot of work into creating adverts to attract clients. Yes clients are important, and bring in revenue, but if we put in as much time into our Job Specifications as we do our advertisements, rather than using a copy-and-paste spec from the internet, don’t you think we would attract GREAT talent?
When we start to interview, do we just use our ‘gut feel’ and offer on the spot, only to regret the decision later, or do we use the tools we have available like assessments, second interviews, and background checks? Imagine if you had that great gut feeling about a candidate, called their last employer and found out they weren’t exactly as great as you thought?
Often we hear that recruiting using a specialist is expensive, but getting the wrong person is much more expensive, says research – as much as five times the wrong hire’s salary. We hear that it takes too much time to create a decent job specification, but doesn’t performance management take so much longer?
So the next time you think about hiring for your own company, think of how important the right person could be for you, and how much time they could save you, before you copy and paste.
