part0011

Your business is about people, it’s not about you. Without good people who understand your vision, share your values and can effectively implement your mission, your business will never realise its full potential. In fact, the less you value your people and insist on running it your way, the more likely it will be to stagnate and potentially come to a complete standstill, or fail. Recruiting, training and retaining the right people is perhaps one of the biggest headaches any small business owner faces, especially if they don’t fully understand what’s involved. For many, it’s a real bear trap, but in their haste to fill vacant positions, they rush headlong into making uninformed and knee-jerk decisions. That’s especially true when recruitment demand outstrips supply, with small business owners filling a vacant seat with no more than a warm body. Nobody wins in this scenario. In this chapter I will guide you through some of the essentials – some obvious, others not – that you need to consider before you even call anyone in for interview. I’ll also explain the preparation process, as well as describe how to avoid some of the commonest traps I’ve seen others fall into.

If you’re new to business leadership and just starting out, or it’s been a while and you’re ready to recruit because the business is expanding, the whole hiring process can represent a huge area of unknowns. Even your past experience might not have taught you well and you’ve ended up spending large sums of money on agency fees or head-hunters only to end up with less than satisfactory employees despite all your efforts. If that’s been a repetitive pattern, then perhaps it’s trying to tell you something and it’s time to sit up and take notice. For starters, the costs to the business are huge when you get it wrong, especially if that’s a cycle that repeats itself over and over again. But when recruitment is done properly, there’s nothing more exciting than hiring really great people who are aligned with your values and who will grow your business. Planning your recruitment strategy is, therefore, every bit as important as planning your sales and marketing.

Ultimately the vacancy you may need to fill is for the job you’re doing right now. By that, I mean, you should be looking to effectively make yourself ‘redundant’. That might sound daft on the surface, but when you think about it, by doing this you’re armour-plating your business. Otherwise the business will always be incumbent on you, in every single area of its operations and, as a result, you will be a slave to it. That’s not an ideal position to occupy if you’re looking to grow your business, especially if a future sale may be in your mind, or if you’re looking to create a lifestyle that allows you to spend more time away from it and on your leisure activities. Of course, if you can’t tear yourself away and can’t handle the thought of anyone else doing what you currently do, then so be it. You’re not the type who will even consider making themselves redundant, because you’re indispensable in every way and you prefer having a workforce that’s more subservient, following your orders. If so, all well and good, but believe me, in my experience, your business won’t grow much beyond what it is today. I can say this with confidence because I see it all the time where small business owners and sole traders are swamped by the sheer volume of day-to-day necessary tasks that need completing simply to keep the ship afloat. They might have plans to scale up, but because they can’t ever see the wood for the trees, they don’t have the time and space to consider how to make that a reality. It’s not their fault, they just haven’t been shown how.

Once again, I’ll point you towards the principles I laid out at the beginning of the book – facing the brutal facts. Step aside for a while and ask yourself, ‘What am I good at? What am I not good at?’ Answer these questions with complete honesty and don’t allow any part of your ego to interfere. It’s tempting to believe that we can be good at everything we do but, in truth, that’s not how humans work. Crucially, be honest about what aspects you enjoy, because otherwise it’s an uphill battle to grow a business successfully if you’re constantly rolling up your sleeves to do tasks you don’t enjoy. Do you really want to spend the rest of your working life on jobs that give you the pip? What might be your nemesis could turn out to be another’s nirvana. Recruiting that person has to be the better option, and it frees you up to focus on areas in the business that really need your attention.

When thinking about recruitment, you need both a strategy and a process in place so that the decisions you make are informed and valuable, and the outcomes deliver the best ROI (return on investment) for you and your business. The business in question might be the small one you’re currently heading up and you need to put people in place so that you can move on. Or, you may currently be looking to expand your team because nothing seems to be working and you’re finding that much of your valuable time is spent in dealing with people problems. What you are certain of is that you no longer want to be the one needing to micromanage. You know that if your business is to grow, you also need the time and space for your growth mind-set to flourish, and so hiring the right people that can serve the vision, mission and values of the business will be key to that future success. It’s an issue that I see many business owners trying to grapple with and it causes more anxiety than it needs to. Over the years, we’ve refined our recruitment strategy and process, which beforehand was one of our biggest pain points and where we made some costly mistakes. These are the lessons I’ll share below which, if you implement them as part of your own recruitment process, will be some of the most important accelerators of your business.

One of the biggest revelations we discovered was using a ‘flywheel technique’, a model which we adapted from Jim Collins’ excellent book Good to Great that I’ve previously referenced. In essence, our version of the flywheel is divided into six segments, the first of which is labelled ‘talent’. As a noun, it goes way beyond the generic term ‘people’; applying that to your thinking from the outset means you’re not simply looking to populate the business with bodies, but with people who have a natural aptitude, or skill, and a growth mind-set. That’s a very different perspective on hiring new team members. It immediately focuses your attention towards attracting great talent into your business who can then drive it forward across different areas, such as marketing, sales, operational delivery and, yes, even accounts. If you’re completely honest with yourself, although you might have been handling any one, or all, of these areas until now, can you say that you have the talent to drive them forward? Be honest and ask yourself:

For example, you might excel at finding new leads, but struggle to convert these into sales. In that case, the obvious solution will be to recruit a salesperson, but that has to be the right salesperson with the necessary talent. Not simply a person who can fill the position. In such a scenario, we create a tailored ‘job scorecard’ which is designed to achieve the stated outcomes identified prior to advertising the role.

Unlike a traditional job description, which really only describes the role, we focus on the desired outcomes first so that we can build a portrait of that ideal person, what they’re doing right now and where they currently are in their career path. Once we’ve completed that part of the recruitment planning process, then attracting their attention to us is key. In many ways, this is more about us selling ourselves to them . Therefore, we invest in short, impactful video-show reels (two or three minutes long) that tell our story: who we are, why we’re a great company to work for and what our values and culture are.

In terms of marketing you and your business, video is a very powerful tool and we all have the capability of creating engaging content. You don’t necessarily need video production aptitude, but you do need the right attitude in order to directly engage with the people you want to reach. Don’t think that if you’re a sole trader, or a small business with only a couple of employees, this won’t work for you. If you have ambitions to grow, simply be honest and enthusiastic about your big plans and make it clear that you’re looking to hire somebody who can take you forward. Then say what you’re offering in return. If that’s minimum wage and no prospects, then don’t be surprised if you attract responses from people who won’t be able to grow your business.

In a competitive employment marketplace you need to pull out all the stops to attract the best candidates, so it’s vital you play your best cards, not simply with the remuneration and the perks, but also the working environment and the culture in which the prospective employee will find themselves. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, the person looking at your video reel needs to feel they can engage with you and understand your vision, mission and values. If you’ve already engaged with the content of this book thus far, then you’ll have begun to build on the emotional capital that talented people find so attractive.

At this point, if you’re thinking, ‘Yes, I want to do this’ but you’ve broken into a cold sweat thinking about how you’ll create and pay for a video, it’s not difficult, and it’s not expensive. In fact, anyone with a smartphone can record and upload their video for free. The more personal and authentic it feels, the better. Or, make use of free-to-use online platforms to create more sophisticated videos, using split screens and slides to tell your story. An example of such a platform is ‘Soapbox’ (https://wistia.com/soapbox ). All you need to invest is a little bit of time, effort and, of course, forethought. As long as you are authentic and as presentable as possible, then a few minutes of your time is a good use of it if you want to reach the right people. If you approach it half-heartedly, however, then guess what? You’ll only get back what you put in. It’s worth getting out of bed that extra hour earlier to focus on your outcome of attracting the best people possible to apply for the job.

Begin the process by nailing down your job scorecard and then composing the advert based on the outcomes. Think about how you’ll market it (including video) and where to promote it. This is not an expensive process, and therefore shouldn’t be a barrier to any small business. We often use platforms such a ‘ZipRecruiter’ and ‘Indeed’ which in reality cost no more than a couple of hundred pounds. The advantage is that online platforms offer you a much wider reach and more instant responses, which we then filter through our initial criteria test:

My thinking behind this is that if I can employ intelligent, energetic people with a real can-do attitude, we can move mountains. For example, with salespeople I’ll teach them how to sell and they’ll assimilate the learning and be able to apply it with little friction. We apply the filters ‘IEA’ to the online application process:

From experience, by applying filters such as these, you’ll be able to eliminate 50% of respondents because they won’t have read the advert correctly. On average, 50% of the remaining candidates then fail the intelligence test, and again, in the next round, 50% won’t progress beyond the short pre-interview. It’s only after all those filters have been applied that our virtual assistant will arrange a direct ten-minute video interview between myself and the candidate. Up until that point, much of the time and pain associated with recruitment hasn’t even crossed my path, freeing me up to concentrate on the business. That’s when you realise the real benefits of the process and scoring system I’ve described above, because otherwise you’ll think, ‘I like this person, they’re like me.’ My strongest advice to business owners: resist the natural urge to recruit in your own image.

Applying and acting on these filters is something that you can easily handle for yourself as a small business owner. As you expand and your recruitment needs become more constant, it’s a responsibility that you will ultimately need to train somebody else to carry out for you. Again, this isn’t prohibitively expensive and in our case we are happy to use overseas services, such as ‘OnlineJobs.ph ’, that we confidently outsource to.

Having agreed to a ten-minute video interview, this is the moment when you can act upon a series of informed responses. You’ll already have formed an impression of the candidate based on their scores as a result of the filtering criteria. Personally, my instinct tells me if they’re going to meet those criteria within the first thirty seconds, and given that I’ve seen other people wasting over an hour of their precious time talking to somebody they’re never going to employ, then ten full minutes of my time is an efficient use of it while maintaining credibility with any recruitment agencies that I also occasionally use. Following this, I will be quite ruthless in my selection of who I’m going to take forward. This results in up to ninety minutes of face-to-face interview when I expect the candidate to come prepared with a presentation – for which a brief has been sent in advance – on how they would intend to smash their targets if they got the job.

This is the final, most thorough part of the process since it shows you which applicant has spent meaningful time researching for the job they’ve applied for, as opposed to those who have cobbled together a weak presentation without giving it much serious thought. I learn a lot about the candidates’ talent at this stage, and it’s never solely about me making a decision based on the fact I like them, or not. Instead, it’s based on the level of detail they’ve prepared for their presentation. From this, I can better judge whether they’re a twenty-minute person, or a five-hour, focused person. I ask them searching questions to see if their responses match our values and culture, such as how they funded their time at university, or what podcasts they listen to, or what was the last business book they read. Inevitably, the candidates that respond with precise and informed answers help us to separate the wheat from the chaff. The one element that always impresses me the most is if they answer with honesty and integrity, not simply with what they think I want to hear. If they demonstrate a sincere desire to learn more than they already know, then they’re coachable and we’re able to tap into their growth mind-set. The fact that you will have taken all this time and effort to create and implement a process will often encourage applicants to want the job more because it’s a challenge. They’ll also respect you because you’ve thought about the interview in depth and they can see that you’re both professional and serious about it, unlike simply having a chat and finishing up with, ‘I like you. Here’s a job.’ How would they value that job then?

From your perspective, even if you’re faced with a raft of candidates, you still might not find that exact person you’re looking to hire. Don’t be tempted, in that case, to take on the best of a bad bunch. Keep going and keep refining your criteria, because if you make the wrong decision in haste to fill the position, this will be very costly. The last thing you want is to find, six months down the line, that your new recruit has screwed up your relationships with clients, or they’re woefully behind on reaching their targets. Then you sack them after months of angst where your subconscious is telling you ‘they’re just wrong for the job’, and then have to go through the whole recruitment process again. In some cases, depending on the size of your business and the role that needs filling, that can cost you a pretty penny, or more. As I say, don’t employ for employment’s sake. If you were the manager of a football team, you’d certainly make sure you had the right players for the right positions on the pitch. You wouldn’t consider fielding a defender in your striker’s position. As Jim Collins says, ‘The right people in the right seats, on the team bus’ – and he’s right.

It’s vital that you track the progress you’re making with your recruitment. As a discipline, it says as much about you in terms of your own time efficiency planning as it does about the people you’re recruiting. If you can’t keep your house in order, the whole process will become messy and, in all likelihood, you’ll employ the wrong person, or even miss the person who’s just right for your business. I prefer to use an online tool, ‘Trello’ (www.trello.com ) which is free, with premium upgrades if required. If you’re not already familiar with it, take a look, run a trial and then discover how it falls into place. At any stage during the selection process I use this resource to see who’s applied, been rejected or who’s going forward to video interview. It’s designed around project management and you should treat tracking your recruitment drive as a project – a very important one.

Having invested time, effort and energy into your recruitment process and finding that right person, it’s your job to develop and retain them. In the past, we’ve not been as attentive as we could have been with our inductions. Today, we see this as the first important step for the new employee’s introduction to the business. Creating an induction plan is, therefore, vital. Again, using Trello (see above) to track their progress is useful as it allows both parties to cross-check that they have gone through any necessary documentation, which is then marked off as read during their probation period. We review this with them on a monthly basis.

Answering the questions shows whether they have the discipline to carry this task out on a daily basis and at the same time keeps us informed. It’s also a simple but effective means of maintaining dialogue through questions and conversation. In return, we reflect their own appetite for discipline by ensuring that we respond daily to these emails. It’s a two-way street but the impact is powerful, especially in spotting where we might have made a mistake in our selection, despite all our best efforts to avoid this. Mistakes do happen – spotting them and acting upon them is, therefore, very important.

Many potential issues and misunderstandings can be mitigated against if the induction planning follows a planned structure and process. Ensuring regular probation reviews and weekly one-to-ones with a series of questions employees fill in beforehand are just as useful for the new person as they are for you. After the first four weeks, these reviews can be scheduled monthly, by which time you should be able to inform them as to where their future with your business is heading. Below are examples of questions grouped into themes that we typically ask our people.

It’s all so different today than when we first started our business. We live in the time of the ‘millennials’ whose expectations are very different to the ‘baby boomers’ and ‘Generation X’. For millennials, staying in the same job for two or three years is like the grass is growing under their feet, and it’s our challenge to firstly attract and then to retain them. How can we do that?

First, create a personal development plan for each individual. Make the effort to learn what they’re aiming for, and in response, how you can support them in achieving that. Give them objectives that stretch them and rework these on a quarterly basis. At each stage, keep track of this (for example, document it in Trello) so that you can keep returning to it during your regular one-to-ones. In our business, we also like to offer an incentive scheme whereby every employee benefits from a pooled 10% share of the business equity (known as a ‘phantom share scheme’). It’s a way of rewarding loyalty and achieving targets on an annual basis and it enables us to retain the talent we’re privileged to work with. As and when the business is sold, each employee benefits. My aim is that all the staff who join us on our journey, and remain in our employ, will at some point in the future receive a significant six-figure sum into their current accounts and, in all probability, be able to return to work the following morning and carry on as normal, if that’s what takes their fancy. It will be our way of rewarding them for helping us outwork the competition, disrupt the market and continue to grow as people. It’s a self-regulating scheme as it means that everyone who works with us is accountable to the next person for the success of the business. Anyone who chooses to move on before that event occurs has their share returned to the pot.

Of course, our aim is, having recruited the right talent, to keep them all on board with us. It’s why we, as leaders, are also open to scrutiny by the workforce. Every three months we conduct an employee engagement survey that tracks all feedback based on a series of scientifically derived questions designed by Gallup and disseminated via SurveyMonkey. All the feedback is anonymous and is reviewed by the management team and discussed on a quarterly basis. At times when we’ve fallen down with our employee engagement and our ratings have dipped, despite our best efforts, we remain open and honest about the results. We always try to find ways to put it right because we trust the level of intelligence of the talented people we were at pains to recruit in the first place. In fact, this underpins our whole philosophy of supporting our talent from the bottom up. We support this approach wholeheartedly and we cheerlead it. We’re humble enough to listen to feedback, and we don’t allow our egos to get in the way of ourselves. We recognise that the more we learn, the more we realise we need to learn. Therefore, perhaps we need to revisit that old phrase of ‘many hands make light work’ in the belief that simply hiring more people will be the solution to all our problems. Rather, we should focus on what those many hands can offer the business in terms of embracing a growth mind-set, and sharing our vision, mission and values. Putting that attitude into practice creates an exciting, forward-thinking working environment that will make all the difference between recruiting the right people to share the workload, or attracting talent to help the business grow.