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- Fatal Mistakes 99% of Biz Owners Make When Hiring
Hey Everyone,
In today’s newsletter, we’re going to go over:
Fatal Mistakes 99% of Biz Owners Make When Hiring
A recent client win
Some great twitter posts and content about hiring
Fatal Mistakes 99% of Biz Owners Make When Hiring:
Having worked with hundreds of business owners over the years, I’ve seen almost everything when it comes to hiring. Bad compensation plans, unrealistic hours, hiring from a place with no infrastructure, you name it, I have seen it.
It’s not business owners’ faults they don’t know how to hire. Hiring is a pretty “unsexy” part of business. It’s not like using some new cold email hack and getting a quick return or testing a new creative in your ads. It’s just dealing with people.
For a solo founder or even with someone with less than 10 employees the hiring process is pretty much always similar to this:
A business owner will find someone they want to hire
have them start
meet with them 2-3 times
give them a couple tasks to do and then 30 days later wonder why this employee wasn’t top notch.
Was this the employee’s fault?Or
Was it the business owner’s fault?
The majority of the time it’s the business owner’s fault…
They don’t know how to run a proper recruitment, onboarding and training process.
When I first started out I made the exact same mistake inside of my business. I had just crossed the $20k a month mark, I had a few part-time freelancers and I needed to hire someone to run the recruitment side of the business. I did the usual activities of asking my network, putting up a job ad on LinkedIn and waiting. I got a few hundred applicants, I filtered the list down to 10 “good” ones, interviewed them and ended up hiring someone with several years of experience in my field.
When they first started everything seemed good. They were responsive, and eager to learn and hit KPIs. After about 30 days things started to go south…
They were slow to respond in Slack, they started making mistakes, complaining about tasks, and ultimately wanting a pay raise of 30%. In the month of them being onboard, client results tanked and I was left ultimately embarrassed of the business I was running.
What’s even worse is after I let them go, my business limped along at a lower revenue mark for 60-90 days after…
I sat there wondering why this had worked out so poorly. I had hired 50+ people before and everything had been successful for clients, so why did I fail so hard when I needed to hire for myself?
In the end, it was my fault.
I rushed a hire and onboarded them into my business without key elements such as: a proper bulletproof onboarding experience, feedback loops, clear KPIs and a ramp up plan.
Looking back, no wonder it failed. I deserved to not be successful with the hire because I didn’t have these key elements in place.
In the next few emails I’ll show you how to put a proper onboarding experience, feedback loop, KPI plan & ramp up plan in place.
That’s all for now,
Ben