How to Hire (and Keep) the Best Talent

Every famous business owner has built a successful company with great employees by her or his side. Your business is only as good as the people who work for and with you. Therefore, it’s important to spend time discussing how to improve your hiring process and retention strategies because if you don’t, you will lose employees most likely to your competitors. Recruiting is not a human resources job. If you’re using the hiring manager cap (and most of us are), recruiting is your responsibility, not HR’s. It is true that human resources can – and should – help, but at the end of the day you are the one who owns the decision.

Besides, hiring employees for an established business is different from hiring for a start-up. There is still the challenge of how to keep the best talent, all this to make this topic even more exciting.

First things first: to hire the right candidate, you need the right job description. If your job description isn’t right, you’ll only waste time and you’ll hire the wrong person. Take the time to write a description of the position thoughtfully so candidates can easily understand it. Writing an accurate position description saves time and helps keep frustration levels low. Too many hiring managers write job descriptions based on skills they’re looking for rather than looking for talent. Remember … a skill is a learned competency. And while almost anyone can be taught a specific skill, talent is much more rare and valuable. Be sure you hire talent, not skills.

As a manager, you have to make many subjective decisions. What happens is that most of the time you won’t have all the information you’d like to have before deciding. This is particularly true during the hiring process. Simply use your best judgment and make the best decision you can. One decision a hiring manager must make that can’t be delegated is whether you should hire overqualified workers or not. Another tough decision to make is about hiring older workers. You may need to weigh their outdated technology skills with what else they bring the team, such as stability, dedication and experience. Ask yourself if they are too slow or does their knowledge in other companies, or industries, give them insights that can help your team innovate. Again, it’s a decision only you as the hiring manager can make. This can’t be delegated to HR or anyone else on the team. Finally, you need to make these decisions based on the quality of your team and what its particular needs are.

Hiring is hard, but hiring for start-ups can be even harder. As a young company with limited cash flow, hiring the wrong employee can potentially break your start-up. Therefore, you have to be very careful with your decisions and do your best to hire top talent. Below you can find some suggestions on hiring the best start-up employees. Some of them are valid for established businesses as well.

1. Build your company with a mission and vision – since you might not be able to offer big paychecks to your employees, you, as the founder, must be able to share your long-term vision with the potential employees and present your company in the best way. It’s like selling them your dream. You need to convince them that you will build a company with a great mission and vision that excites them;

2. Consider hiring remote employees – If you are having a hard time finding talent in your local area, remote employees can be an option. In case this is in fact a possibility, you now have an entire world full of talented employees from which to choose. If remote employees are not a viable choice for your start-up, perhaps you can offer flexible working arrangements, such as working from the office three or four days a week and one or two days at home to tempt talent to choose your company;

3. Be a great place to work – as we all know, word of mouth is an effective tool for finding great talent. Besides, great people know great people. If your current employees are happy with their work environment, they will talk to their friends about it. Build and maintain a great company culture, be a great place to work and great people will want to work for you. It is well known that people who enjoy their jobs, their co-workers, and the environment will work harder, complain less, and add more value to the company they work for;

4. Hold onto your existing talent – talented people want to work with other talented people. They are interested in constant growth and being around other talented people inspire and drive motivation. And when you have great talent in your company, it becomes easier to attract even more first-class talent;

5. Offer challenging projects – talented people don’t want to waste their time working on boring and repetitive projects. They want to be challenged, so give people stimulating, ambitious and big goals, and they will love the challenge and thank you for that;

6. Talk about your company – speak at events and network constantly. Expand your talent hunt by taking the time to speak at events and informal meetings. Speaking engagements are great opportunities to sell your company and vision to potential future employees and co-workers. In addition, these are great networking environments.

Hiring talents is just the start to create a strong workforce. Next, you have to keep them. High employee turnover costs business owners in time and productivity. With more than half of the employees actively looking for other job opportunities, organizations lose billions of dollars every year due to employee turnover.

How to keep the talents that you hired? This is something we will address in a future article.

Here’s a hint. It’s not always about money!

Stay tuned!

This article is for general, indicative purpose only and should not be considered investment advice. Florida Connexion is not liable for any financial loss, damage, expense or costs arising from your investment decisions based on this article.

At Florida Connexion our multidisciplinary business brokers can assist you in identifying the right business for you and the right buyer for your business.