There are plenty of other top 3, top 5, and top 100 blogs, books, YouTube videos, etc on hiring. These are just my top 3 tips and things to focus on that I feel do not get covered as much but seem to be a big pain point and possibly cause misjudgments when you’re hiring. Especially for that important role.

1. Set a timeline: The last thing you want to do, is hire too early. If you do you are not prepared for this person to come into their new role feeling confident, focused, and purposeful. Many times when in small businesses these roles are new roles, not yet clearly defined or proven with people who carved them beforehand. If you bring someone in too early, you are setting them up for failure with unclear definitions on what determines success and fall short. Without clearly defining what you need this role to accomplish, how can you even be sure you hired the right person?

Obviously on the other end of this is hiring at the last minute. If you need a new sales leader, or marketing manager, and you planned on executing a new initiative in June but don’t hire them until the middle of May, are you setting them up for success? Are you setting your strategy up for success? No, likely not. Have a clear timeline planned. This includes needed candidate sourcing time, role creation and definition, success metric definition, onboarding and training development and completion as well as percieved rampup time. It won’t be perfect, becuase as the great Mike Tyson has been quoted saying, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”. However a timeline and a plan, even if it doesn’t go perfectly, is MUCH better than not having any at all.

2. Always have a plan B for your onboarding and training: You bring someone on, they are a perfect fit, they’re already bleeding the colors (Weird way of saying they 100% back the company), but the training is missing the mark. Or the person you put in charge of their training has a medical emergency, or has a load of work dumped on them and they just can’t focus on getting this new key team member up to speed.

I have seen it time and time again, this person is left to learn things on there own. Which in some cases is okay, they can learn on the job, they can find unique ways to accomplish similar outcomes. However, this is shortsighted. A company is like a living organism, or a like a machine. You pull one lever over here, it effects the outputs way down the chain. A new hire, left to figure things out on their own will not have the insight into the causes and effects and can cause issues, and sometimes these issues are not caught until later. These mishaps can tarnish even the most seasoned of professional’s confidence, which again, sets them up for failure.

Do NOT let any excuse get in the way of properly training and onboarding new hires no matter how seasoned they are. Sure, a newer company can hire a seasoned pro to come in and create some of these things and improve processes, create departments, etc. However that doesn’t mean you skip training them on the other aspects of your business, take the time to ingrain them in the culture and set them up for success.

3. Don’t be Afraid to add interviews: Yes, for some roles you don’t want to get interview crazy, especially for more entry-level positions. But to be quite frank, unless you’re a $100M business, even entry-level positions can be considered key roles. I have seen cases where top leaders are struggling to decide between candidates, (or even what roles they should hire for, which is not a great place to be in) and they just sit in a meeting going back and forth, pros and cons, yada yada. By the end of the meeting, they are more confused than ever, because we tend to make up stories that don’t exist to make decisions easier for us, and they basically resort to flipping a coin and that is it.

Why not have another quick interview? Over the phone, or over Zoom, or if they are close by take them for coffee. Have another trusted member of the team interview them to get a different perspective. It’s always better to spend some time on another interview and increase the chances this hire will be the right person for the job than to be unsure about a decision. Because then, you will always be thinking through every little mistake, ‘Should we have gone with the other person?”. This puts doubt in your mind about the candidate and possibly sets them up for failure.

As you can probably tell, there is a recurring theme here. Comment below if you spotted it.