I'm Kaylan, leadership educator, podcaster & speaker

What are you searching for?

Reading suggestions

Crafting a 90-Day Onboarding Plan

Job Postings that Attract Top Talent

Mapping Your Leadership Style

Podcast

How to Avoid Hiring the Wrong People

April 28, 2021

Hiring is tricky. I think we’ve all seen what happens when you hire the wrong people but with that you’ve probably also seen what can happen when you hire the right people. Today on the Joy to Lead Podcast, I’m going to walk you through some do’s and don’ts of hiring so that when the time comes to grow your team, you can be confident that you are hiring the right person and avoiding the wrong people.

Listen to the Episode Now

Hiring the Wrong Person Usually Starts with Making a List of Things that You Don’t Want to do Anymore

That is not the starting point when you are making a hire. The reason for this is unbeknownst to you, you’re creating a business model where your team is being built around you, thus placing yourself as the center. When we are taking our job and piecemealing it out, we’re building a wheel around ourselves in which we build a team that is completely reliant upon us.

Your team is going to look to you as the constant delegator and standard of excellence. Your standard is going to be their standard. Which sounds great, except that what we’re doing is siphoning their autonomy and placing ourselves as the bottleneck. We’re stifling their growth and their performance, which could be higher than we could ever achieve.

What we want to do is take the business that is inside of us and draw it out outside of us. We want the business to exist outside of us.

Hiring Someone Your Friend Knows is not Always in Your Best Interest and Can Lead to Hiring Wrong

For every new team member you bring on, you should not just ask your friend who they use and grab onto them.  When you do this, you are not only putting yourself in a position where you are emotionally involved since your new hire is a friend and employee of your friend but now you either can’t let them go or will struggle to let them go if the time were to arise.

If you don’t have boundaries set in place, you and a friend are now sharing a team member which can lead to unnecessary drama. You need to make sure that you’re hiring the right person and not hiring the wrong person. So you have to put everybody through the same process, to ensure that you’re bringing on the right person for this role.

Don’t Wait Until You are Desperate for Help to Hire Someone

I’m speaking from experience on this one. When you are hiring from a place of desperation, you will grab the first hand that comes along to help you which most of the time leads to hiring the wrong person. It clouds your judgment and ability to objectively evaluate which leads to you becoming emotionally involved. When you are emotionally involved in the hiring process, your emotions will begin to lead instead of you. You will be unable to control when you need to plug them in or take them out where appropriate. You want to be everyone’s best friend and have everyone on your team but not everyone is meant to be on your team.

You can Ensure You Hire the Right Person by Mapping Out Your Business Model from Beginning to End

Begin by mapping out three to four main departments of your business along with certain tasks, projects, recurring tasks and projects for each department. These tasks and projects are what make up your business model. You may find that you’re probably doing too much and other things that probably aren’t producing a ton of return on investment that we need to cut out. 

There are some leadership tasks we should all be spending time in in CEO mode, and areas that would create more revenue if you were to dive deeper into them. Instead of asking yourself what tasks can you dump off onto somebody else, ask yourself: “Where is my business calling me deeper?” 

From there, you should have a map of your business model from beginning to end. From marketing, sales and fulfillment. Then determine from your list of tasks and projects what are required to keep your business alive.

Identifying the Areas You Need to Go Deeper Can Lead to Creating More Revenue

If you find that your business is needing you to step deeper into sales, how are you giving yourself a promotion? What is the core role that you need to bring on in order for you to facilitate that training? From there you will begin to see the gaps so you can begin shaping the role for your incoming hire.

Ready to Step Into Your Leadership?

Want to learn how to bridge the gap and make your first hire within the year? Let’s prepare your leadership and understand how to hire, train and lead your dream team.

We want to welcome YOU in to the Joy to Lead® Leadership Academy. In the Academy, you will learn to:

  1. Know who, when and how to hire next
  2. Coach other humans in their own growth – all while using your strengths⠀⠀
  3. Discover how YOU inspire, motivate, delegate and LEAD others as well as yourself

Join us today – we’d love to have you alongside us in this community!

I'm Kaylan, leadership educator, podcaster & speaker

What are you searching for?

Reading suggestions

Crafting a 90-Day Onboarding Plan

Job Postings that Attract Top Talent

Mapping Your Leadership Style