Most of your employees are probably great. But it’s likely that you have a few that aren’t pulling their weight. And, even the great employees are rarely as dedicated to your company as you’d like them to be. You’re a reasonable boss but sometimes it feels like a challenge to recruit and hire the very best employees.
Use these powerful, proven, and innovated tips to overcome the hassles and build a STRONG team.
Strategy #1. Change Your Thinking About Who You Want
When you have a spot to fill on the schedule, and your other employees are grumbling about picking up the slack, it can be easy to take the “any warm body” default approach and just hire someone to fill in. However, this doesn’t help you in the long run and only causes problems. The better approach is to just keep looking, and assure your existing employees that you only hire the best, which not only reinforces the need for you to keep looking, but also reinforces the value you place on them.
Look for new team members who view themselves as more than employees. Look for team members who consider themselves partners, leaders, and go-getters. Unfortunately, a lot of managers shy away from these types of employees because they see them as hard to manage or not team players, but the star players KNOW they are star players and if you can get them to work for you, AND figure out how to manage them, you’ll focus their energy to help your company grow.
Strategy #2. Change Your Thinking About What They Want
Many leaders make the mistake of thinking that all new employees care about is money. And the logical conclusion of this thought process is: “If I want to hire top performers I need to pay top dollars,” which can sound restrictive if you don’t have a big payroll budget.
Fortunately, nothing is further from the truth. While you should be paying your team a fair wage, and potentially slightly better than your competitors, money is not the only thing your employees care about. Many employees, even A-players may come to you for other advantages—you just need to figure out what those advantages are. If you’re a small company, maybe there is a faster climb up the corporate ladder. If you have a lot of training, maybe eager learners will appreciate that. If you have flexible hours, you might get A-players who can’t work traditional shifts. Find out what your advantages are and highlight them.
Strategy #3. Build A Culture
This is overlooked but so important to your company. Your culture is the strength of the community of your team, and it’s how your team feels about working together and working for you. Every company has a culture. However, only the most successful companies create their culture by design (while the rest allow culture to grow by default).
Your culture should be one of tight-knit camaraderie, in which every team member feels that they are a valuable member of the group, and no one gets left behind. If you want to build culture, first decide what you want your culture to be, then create shared experiences that your team members participate in. And if this is all new to you, find a culture-building expert and study how they build culture in their company.
Strategy #4. Hold A Recruiting Night
Instead of taking precious hours of your day to interview many candidates, use this very powerful approach: invite all candidates to your office for a group interview at the same time. Bring everyone into a room and interview them as a group. Ask questions and see who responds. Get people to tell you about themselves in just a few seconds, in front of everybody.
This powerful approach will not only save you time but quickly reveals how your potential employees act in an unusual situation. The cream rises to the top in these scenarios and the stand-out A-players will be easy to spot in this crowd.
Summary
Running a business with employees can be challenging, yet it’s necessary. But the companies that grow are the ones who master recruiting, hiring, and managing A-player employees. These 4 strategies can give you an unfair advantage against your competitors and put more star employees on your company roster.
Mike Agugliaro is the “Business Warrior” and founder of CEO Warrior, a business consulting, training and mentoring firm, providing tested and proven methods to defeat the roadblocks that prevent small to mid-sized businesses from achieving their ultimate success. He has played a key role in building and selling Gold Medal Service, New Jersey’s largest and most respected home service company. For more information about CEO Warrior, visit www.CEOWARRIOR.com.