Hiring the right people is one of the most important elements of a successful business, no matter the size or industry. Unbelievably, it is also one of the most overlooked components when planning for your company’s growth, profitability, and triumphs.

Like a professional rowing team, a successful business team depends on a powerful advantage in synchronizing their work efforts, leveraging complementary strengths, behaviors and abilities to win over competitive challenges. What makes your company stand out from the others in a crowded field of rivals?

• Ask the New England Patriots, the New York Yankees, the Chicago Bulls, or the Montreal Canadienswhat made them great or even a dynasty.
• Ask any Oscar winner what factors were responsible for their big win.
• Ask the stars of Seinfeld, The Big Bang Theory, M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, Blue Bloods, or the Law and Order franchises what factors led to their long-term success.
• Ask any successful Fortune 500 company CEO why their company rose to success.

In all of these cases, while there were individual leaders of these successful ventures, the leaders did not do it alone. And there is no doubt — we have heard it often – each of these leaders will tell us that their successes were a result of huge contributions by an excellent team working in collaboration with them.

Constructing the ideal team for your business is vital to your company’s success. Conversely, making bad hires is detrimental, sometimes insurmountable, and always awfully expensive.

But how expensive is a bad hire?

• 30 percent — The S. Department of Labor says the cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings.
• Up to $240,000 — The Undercover Recruiter reports bad hires can cost $240,000 in expenses, broken down by costs related to hiring, pay and retention.
• An average of $14,900 — CareerBuilder says 74% of companies who made a poor hiring choice lost an average of $14,900 per poor hire.
• An average of 17 weeks — Studies show employers know within 4 weeks they made a bad hire. It then takes 8.8 weeks to terminate the bad hire followed by another 5 weeks to find a replacement.

A bad hire is expensive, time-consuming, may negatively affect motivation, productivity, and reputation, and can result in a long recovery time – thus making it an extremely costly mistake.

Tips

What can you do to ensure you do not make the mistake of an ill-fated hire?

• Know what you are looking for, in a job candidate and in your team.
• Define your company culture before you hire a new team member or an entire team.
• Bring other team members, who the candidate will be engaging with in the job, into the hiring process.
• Remain consistent throughout the whole hiring process.
• Be prepared to ask in-depth questions to get to know the person within the limited amount of time you have with them.
• Create an accurate job description.
• Institute an employee referral plan — the best employees may be someone an excellent staff member already knows.

Tools

Utilize any and all hiring tools available to you for this very important decision.

• Recruitment plans are your best chance for being properly prepared to make a successful hire.
• Personality tests are a useful tool to help you determine where candidates are weak or strong in your culture.
• Online hiring platforms expand your reach so that you can tap into the largest pool of outstanding qualified candidate.
• Take advantage of progressive technology. Many companies take a first meeting by phone or even video in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Tactics

Developing the ideal team starts with the hiring process but is not limited to hiring. You already have a team – how can you improve the team while motivating and rewarding employees?

• Observe candidates in different settings, like a restaurant. You can learn a lot about a person after sharing a meal with them.
• Get references and speak to people who know the candidate and have worked with them in some capacity.
• Evaluate and put (or move) employees into roles which best suit them.
• Provide onboarding training and continuous training to give new and existing employees the best chance of success with your company.
• Provide professional development and business coaching to help motivate your employees.

Your Secret Weapon

Being able to “check your ego at the door” and make any necessary changes within yourself for the betterment of your company and employees is an enormous advantage over your competitors. Not everyone is willing to take an honest look at themselves to determine that possibly they, themselves may be the biggest factor holding the company back from amazing growth.

This really can be a great bonus in your effort towards success. We recently had a conversation with one of our SEN Members who decided he needed help in getting his business to the next level. He discovered 2 things:

• Through bi-monthly Business Coaching, he discovered the biggest obstacle to success was himself. He is working hard at making the necessary improvements, delegating certain tasks to employees who excel at those tasks while he concentrates on the tasks that are his strengths.
• Utilizing personality tests (in a limited capacity at first and may extend it) to determine the strengths of his team and himself. This is the best way to get the most successful business results by pulling from every team member’s greatest strengths and utilizing those strengths in the smartest way possible.

John Lang, SEN Business Coach, told a story about a SEN Member business coaching student who thought he made a bad hire of someone who appeared to be a very talented professional who could help his company. The employee struggled. With the help of a personality test, he was able to learn the employee’s strengths and reassign his job to something that fit his qualities and qualifications. It was exactly the change he needed and is flourishing in his new role, to the benefit of everyone — the company, himself, and his colleagues.

It is well worth talking about the testing that SEN used for our own team and is also available from our resources, including business coaching.

TTI TriMetrix® DNA provides a wealth of information to both the employer and employee. It does take some courage to participate — no one is particularly anxious to learn about their weaknesses, after all. But the business owner and the employee who can, as we said earlier, “check their ego at the door” can benefit tremendously from the learnings of this very detailed process. By putting in the hard work to better ourselves continuously, it can be a secret weapon for success that sets you apart from the rest of the field.

Personality tests can be scary but if you are open to learning, especially self-evaluation, you may find it valuable in both your professional and personal lives. As individuals, this test examines:

• Behaviors
• Driving Forces
• Integrating Behaviors and Driving Forces
• Competencies

As a team, you gain valuable information that determines each person’s talents and maps these characteristics to help business owners and managers distribute the talent in the smartest way possible:

• Overview  A summary examining the composition of your team for both DISC (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Compliance) and behavioral segmentation expressed as a percentage.
• Team Composition  Defines the makeup of your organization by behavioral segment and shares the DISC graphs of individuals on your team.
• Behavioral Segment Analysis  Examines the individuals within each segment, segment characteristics, ways to communicate, and ideal environment.
• Group Wheel Plots  Identifies the natural, adapted, and migrated styles of each team member.
• Behavioral Style Comparison  Compares individual scores to others on the team, team averages, and population means.

At SEN, we have found this information to be enlightening to us as individuals and a great opportunity for us to do our best work as a team. It truly gives us the best opportunity for success. While it is often difficult to see ourselves how others see us, it is more so, a great opportunity for each of us to grow professionally and allow us to always be learning about ourselves and how we can best contribute to our organization. It is hard work and we must constantly re-evaluate ourselves as individuals and as a team but the progress we see makes it a worthwhile process.

For more information on Business Coaching opportunities and TTI testing, contact John Lang.