The difference between making what a business should and what it did is a function of who gets hired into a business and retained by management.
If you have people you regret hiring in your employ, you need a more structured hiring process. A poor hire not only costs you significant money. They make it difficult for your best employees who must work with them.
Avoid this costly mistake by taking more care to hire an employee than you would to borrow money to buy a high-priced asset you expect to make “big” money by acquiring.
Overview
The most valuable resource in any business is its people. The people in your employ have the most significant impact on business profitability and cash flow while representing one of the top three costs for the business. The people it hires today are the key to every company’s future, no matter its size. Adopting a structured interview process improves your odds of hiring the best people.
A major mistake for most interviewers is asking too many general questions covering a wide area. This results in superficial answers and fails to give depth of understanding to a candidate. Instead, stay focused on the critical few objectives of the open position and drill down. In other words, follow through on your questions by going deeper, asking for more specifics and details to learn why they did what they did.
A candidate’s ability to give you specifics is how you assess their fit for the position. Their inability to give specifics—shows you that they are not someone to hire. Knowing and speaking the “jargon” is more a cover-up for lack of real applied experience. When “jargon” without substance is given, you have a candidate attempting to “bluff” you into thinking they can do the job.
Never underestimate the cost and profit impact of each individual you invite to come into your employ. This is particularly true in small businesses with few employees.
The best way to improve business profitability and cash flow is to hire the best people. Use a structured hiring process to help you screen out the best candidate from the average, particularly from the weak.
Failure to hire the right person disrespects your good employees, distracts everyone, and costs you money. If you find yourself wishing you had never hired a person, it represents an opportunity to review your hiring process to see what you missed. It also forces you to implement your progressive discipline process to deal with the substandard employee whose performance costs you money.