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The 7 Most Common Hiring Mistakes made by Small Businesses Summary/Description Many entrepreneurial business owners share some common mistakes when hiring people. What are they and what is their impact on the business? More importantly, how do you stop doing it? ______________________________________________________________________________________________ Having worked with lots of small and medium business owners for many years, I have discovered a common thread that links their hiring practices. They are as follows: 1. They do not start with a clear idea about their expectations for the new hire 2. They regularly hire the wrong candidates 3. They frequently hire someone they perceive to be just like them 4. They do not admit their hiring mistakes easily 5. They compound the problem by keeping the wrong person doing the job 6. They blame their new hire for not performing 7. The new hire proves to be a costly mistake and gets moved into a different role and eventually leaves or gets fired. Most entrepreneurial business owners are terrific at big picture stuff. They have a clear idea of their market place, their product offering and where they eventually want to take the business. However, not all of them are particularly good at the detailed stuff like logistics, administration and finance. They may be great at winning contracts but disastrous at fulfilling them. They may cause the business to overtrade because they do not understand the funding implications of growing a business too fast. This creates the need for a new hire to come on board to work at fulfillment or finance & administration. The owner may craft a job description that seems to match the needs of the business but gives little thought to introducing key performance targets, which the incumbent shall be expected to meet or surpass. In fact, the owner may be so happy to get someone on board to share the load that he loses sight of how suitable the candidate may be in the first place. The number one mistake that entrepreneurial business owners make is hiring people in their own image. They hire people that seem to have an entrepreneurial flair just like them, when what they really need is somebody with a completely different skill set and driving force. They like people who are mirror images of themselves but this is almost always the wrong choice. At some level, they become conscious that the new hire is not a good fit for the business after several weeks or months but they refuse to bite the bullet. The problem can often get worse by giving the employee mixed messages such as a severe dressing down in the morning followed by praise for some aspect of their performance in the afternoon.
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Avoid changing the job description or moving the new hire into a different role to try and hide your hiring mistake. If you make a hiring mistake, simply admit it, deal with it and move on. Delaying the inevitable can cost you money and set the business back by 6 months or more. This is not a blame game. You are simply doing what is best for the business. Just try not to make the same mistake again. When choosing new hires, use the 95% rule. In essence, this dictates that you must hire people that spend 95% of their time doing things that they excel at. The trick is to gather a group of people together that comprises individuals that can joyfully spend 95% of their time excelling in a single area such as operations, finance, administration, sales, marketing etc. In other words, do not waste effort in trying to get people to work really hard in areas where they are weak. Instead, focus them entirely on areas where they are individually strong. BIO Resource Box Niall Strickland is an MBA with more than 20 years of business coaching and management consulting experience working with CEO’s in small and medium businesses. He can provide additional information about common business issues and how to resolve them at www.NiallStrickland.com. This article has also been published on www.EzineArticles.com
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