Hiring: Give It the Attention You Deserve
At a recent Around the Horn Session, the group was introduced to someone who needed to hire, but he wasn’t sure about how to go about getting it all organized. The new employee’s responsibilities were to be developing relationships.
Someone who does business development, and is an excellent networker, recommended that the new employee should have the right level of experience, like knowing sales and budgeting—because if the new hire is going to do networking (which is generally considered the best way to develop relationships), they would need a budget. The new hire should also know how to create online relationships, which means they would need to be good at social media marketing, online marketing, and building online communities.
Someone else suggested that the hiring business needs to do housekeeping of its own, and devote time to training the new hire. Unfortunately, what often happens is that the owner of the business retains all of their knowledge in their head, and the question becomes how to get it all out. How do they know what to put on paper or to transfer to this new person?
My comment was that you need to sit down and write out everything you possibly can about the business, about the process, about the ideal client set, about everything you know. And then you have to revisit it several times, because invariably you will have left things out.
I’ve been involved in several software development projects where something was being automated from a manual system, or something was being translated from one system to a more sophisticated system, and there was always somebody who was the go-to expert. Often that person would sit with other employees and share everything they thought they knew…and then two weeks before the project was finished, they would say, ”Oh, wait, we left out some vital thing! Everything has to be reprogrammed!”
The real value here is the opportunity to sit down and lay it all out, everything that you know, as the principal of a company or as a hiring manager.
So, as you hire people, you need to have a system, because everybody has to be on the same page. And as far as the person that you’re going to hire, or that you’d like to hire, you need to know who that person must be beforehand. You need to know what qualities, what qualifications, what characteristics they possess; you need a job description for that position before you even start to look for the right person.
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Dave Bresler
President of Network!Network!
Phone: 914-924-1297
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