The Mistake You Didn’t Know You Were Making When It Comes To Hiring

Lauren: You built your product, you launched your business, You saw success, money in the bank, growing team, happy client, but now you feel like you’re drowning. I’m here to help you get your head above water. I’m Lauren Goldstein. My clients call me the Business Doctor.

Together we’ll diagnose the root cause of your business worries, whether it’s your people, your process, your product, we’ll clarify your business. So you can scale without the burnout, and then we will simplify it all so your business can do what it’s designed to do, make a profit and an impact. Welcome to the Biz Doctor Podcast.

Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode, I’m gonna dive into a mistake I see a lot of business owners make with smaller teams that is so easily avoidable here. It is not having enough clarity on the role before you. I know I can almost feel you rolling your eyes, but hear me out. Have you ever said one of the following, We need to hire someone yesterday.

We’ll figure it out when we get them hired. I know something is off in the business, and I think if we hire XYZ, then that should do the trick or something. In that same vein, if you answered yes or can see that you might be reactively hiring rather than proactively hiring, well guess. You might unknowingly be making this mistake, but if you’re not after this episode, you will have a kick butt tool to ensure you never repeat the insanity again.

So it all starts with clarity and the innate talents of the employee. And our golden key scorecard, which you’ve heard me talk about before, is the cheat sheet. You’ve been looking. Trust me. When you do this, you’re gonna save yourself a boatload of time, frustration, and revenue, considering a bad higher cost on average, $14,900 or 30% of their first year salary.

Personally, I think it’s more when you factor in your time and your energy as well as the impact it has on the team. So let’s dive into what areas you need to clarify before you hire for your next role. So the first area that you need to clarify is what are they accountable? I know this might seem like a no brainer, but having these accountabilities set up before you hire will go a long way.

It helps you get crystal clear on if this is a one person role, or sometimes I actually see a lot of people hiring for a role that they think is only one person, but really it’s multiple roles wrapped into one. And y’all know how I feel about unicorns or people doing unrelated projects or tasks in their role and how that sets the business and team up for failure.

If you don’t know what my stance is on that, or unicorns go back and give season one episode three A. Listen. The Why Jack of all trades will kill your business. So going back to why it is so important to know exactly what they’re accountable to, it gives you and them a north star. It allows you to have something that.

Be a way to make sure that they’re staying on track, you’re staying on track, and that what you hired them for is actually making a difference in your business. If you hire them to do tasks or projects, it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it hard to judge when someone is being successful in a role are not.

And so if you know what they’re accountable to, and here’s a hint for you guys, try to keep it to between, I would. Two to three major things, less than five for sure, because human beings in general can’t do a lot more than five things well. So if you can keep the three big accountabilities. In their role and make it very specific, you’ll have a lot more success.

So if you can get very, very clear on their one big thing, this is something that if they did nothing else, this would make a huge difference in their, in their role, in your business, in your team, et cetera. And start there. And then add two, maybe three. that you know that when they accomplish these, you’re gonna have momentum, you’re gonna have progress, and you’re gonna have success that you didn’t have before.

So again, why this is very important is making sure that you have a tangible thing that you can help them measure success against. The second area that you need to clarify before you hire for a role is who are they in their DNA asking this question versus. A lot of business owners hire for tasks like, I need them to do X, Y, Z, versus thinking about what kind of person is gonna be successful in this role with their personality, how they look at projects, how they process information, et cetera, is gonna be the difference between frustration and failure and success and momentum when you ask this question.

It really helps you think through the role also from a perspective of, is this one person or two people? Because some things might seem like they’re related, like maybe they all seem like marketing or sales or ops, but in reality, while it might be similar things, it takes two different innate talents.

I’ll give you a really great example. If you say absolutely love being back of house, somebody who’s a recovering perfectionist like myself, like staa, like accuracy, and then you put them in a sales role or a partnership role that she was never going to fit. Because you can teach someone to use all the latest and greatest things, but if they’re not wired in a way that will allow them to be successful in the role, then the chances of failure skyrocket.

So when you think about who actually is gonna be successful in this role and how do they need to think or act or be innately not about the technology, then you are setting them up for success. You’re setting yourself up for success and it makes it a really smooth fun team. So in the case of somebody who you need to do sales and partnership, obviously you need a high energy people lover who thrives on building connect.

Not somebody who likes data and details in crossing t’s and dotting is, and probably not an introvert because I can tell you that this is not my strong suit either. And I’ll give you another really great example. When I was hiring for my other company, I was hiring a new, uh, bookkeeper, accountant cuz at that time, um, we unexpectedly lost, um, our bookkeeper and accountant of 30 years to cancer.

And. We were in Lurch. I was doing the job because sometimes you have to be the Chief everything officer, but I knew who I was looking for and I knew that innately I was looking for somebody. Who would not be satisfied if there was one sent off? Somebody who liked doing accounts receivable, accounts payable.

Um, in that business, we have a very high accounts receivable balance that we carry just due to the nature of the business. And so a large part of that role is actually following up on payments to make sure we get paid. And so I knew that this was gonna take a specific person. And again, when you go back and you think about like this [00:08:00] person, you know, likes closed loops, they like data, they like following up.

They do like people, but they like people from like a data perspective. Like winning for them is getting the person to pay right. By having this innate talent conversation, you’re able to really get to the crux of what’s gonna make someone successful versus frustrated. Cause if I just hired somebody to bill out or balance books or generate invoices like.

No offense to anybody out there, but like a monkey could do that. Right? But it doesn’t mean that just because you can do it, you should be doing it. Cause I can do a lot of things just like a lot of you listening, but it doesn’t mean I should be doing it cuz it’s not in my innate talent wheelhouse. It’s not my superpower, it’s also not my happy place.

We can go do things that we don’t love doing. You know, the grunt work from time to time, but being stuck there is a recipe. For failure, and this is why this is actually, if you’ve heard me talk about the four Cs of hiring success, this is one of the Cs, which is capability. What are those innate talents and capabilities that they have to be successful?

And in the last area that really, really needs to be clarified before you ever even hit the submit button on Indeed, is to ask yourself, how does this fit into the business as a whole? What problem are they really solving to move the business? Again, I know this might seem like no shit. Sure luck, but trust me, sometimes when we’re reactively hiring, we don’t look at the whole landscape of how someone fits into the business and the impact that they have company wide.

And this is really important because you wanna make sure that by hiring them, you’re helping all the ships rise with the tide, not inadvertently creating leaks in the business by adding friction, ambiguity, or something on the bottom line that will drain time team and profits. The whole purpose of this episode is to take you from reactive hiring to proactive hiring, and if you take a moment and you step back and you really get clear on why you’re hiring this role, it saves you a lot of time in both searching for somebody, onboarding, leadership, et cetera.

It also saves you a lot in the bottom line. When I’ve come in with different clients, when they’ve either worked with me or when I’ve come in as interim COO and helped with the team and tuning it up and hiring. Sometimes the person that you think you’re gonna hire in this moment, when you proactively look at the landscape, it can change and you can say, Actually, we don’t need to hire this person right now.

We need this person right now. A great example is one of my clients we were talking about. You know who he needs on the team and and whatnot. And he had just hired somebody before he became one of my clients, and we were talking about his struggles with this particular hire. And it came down to actually all three of these.

It was not clear what she was accountable to and also seems that what he needed her to do, she was not innately set up to do. And then in terms of fitting in the business, he added a cost to the bottom line and couldn’t quite draw the correlation of how this was creating more time for him or more revenue for the business.

And so, We moved some accountabilities, got some clarity, and she now fits in a different way because she’s accountable and the expectations are different. And then we also illuminated that really, actually what he needs is a project manager. This particular person that he hired was supposed to help with this, but that wasn’t her primary role.

It was just something that she was going to help with. But in reality, what we uncovered is that by adding this particular role, which wasn’t even necessarily on his radar as a whole role, it was melted into something else. Again, going back to clarity of if this is one role, two roles, he’s able to not only support the team better, but free up to what was the.

I think it was 25 hours a week in stuff that he was managing just by hiring this person. That’s why this last section, I think is almost even more critical than the other two is because when you really think about why you’re hiring this role, how it fits in, What problem they’re solving. You can make sure that the higher and the person that you’re about to put in this role is really going to make a difference and move the business forward.

Because we all know when you get stuck on that ever escalating, the profits go up, the revenue goes up, but then your expenses go up and the profits go down. And so if you wanna get off that, you know, revenue goes up, expenses go up, I don’t know, loo even then it starts with this. Again, the clarity of the innate talents, who they are, how do they fit in this business as a whole, and what are they accountable to is going to help you see hiring as an investment and something that’s actually exciting and moves your business forward.

Instead of, a lot of times we’re avoiding it because it seems like a lot of work or it’s gonna be a lot of cost, and so it actually helps your employee work for you and the business instead of the other way around. Now, if you’ve been madly scribbling, fear not, as I mentioned earlier, all of these questions are listed in my Golden Scorecard.

It’s honestly the best tool for getting the most out of your current. And hitting the bullseye with food cheer hires. My clients love to hate it because it does take some sitting down and putting in the time. But trust me, when you do this, you’re gonna save yourself a boatload of time, frustration, and revenue, considering, as I shared at the beginning of the episode, a bad higher costs on average of 14,900 or 30% of their first year salary.

And again, when you actually do the math on how much time and energy you’re spend, On hiring on your team, you wanna create time. This is how you create time by leveraging team. If you would like to get our scorecard, I’m gonna link it in the show notes. As always, if you have follow up questions, I’d love to hear from you.

Connect with you. But that’s really it for this week’s episode. Thanks so much for listening in. It’s because of listeners like you that I embarked on this podcast journey. I’d love to hear from you or your biggest takeaways. Make sure you’re following along. Tag me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn or wherever you hang out on the inner web.

Don’t forget to subscribe, and thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to The Biz Doctor Podcast. You’re probably wondering what your next steps are. Hmm. So here are some options for you no matter what.

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After. Register for our next workshop. Ooh, I host them often, and it’s a great way to interact with me in a virtual room and get your questions answered. All of that info is on our website at https://www.goldenkeypartnership.com.

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