BONUS 244: Common Mistakes in BAD Hiring

0:00Welcome to the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast, intended to equip and encourage business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, taught by active business owner, best-selling author, and teacher, Sean Castrina. All right, Sean Castrina with the 10 Minute Entrepreneur Podcast, where you get some stake, some protein, to become a better entrepreneur, to become a better business owner. If you're business is stuck, I'm here to help you. If you're trying to launch a business, I'm here to help you. What we're going to talk about today is common mistakes in bad hiring. I have said, and if you listen to the seven deadly sins of a startup, bad hiring is one of the seven deadly sins. If I go and consult with the company, staffing is going to be one of the absolute pillars that I find that is weak without question. It's rare that I'm going to go into a company and see that it is staffed as well as it could be.

1:00There's a variety of reasons, typically, the reason why they have bad hiring is I'm going to take you through these reasons and hopefully that we can improve them, but let's take a look at why people don't hire well. First is they hire the first person who looks good. They just do. The first person comes in and they hire them. That person looks good. They're just not patient to find the best hire. They hire the first person that dots all the boxes is hired. Instead of maybe interviewing a few and having a choice of a few, what I try to do when I'm hiring is have one person after the next. I want it to look like a conveyor belt of potential candidates. I want people to interview and realize they better be on their A game because there's something sitting in the reception area for their job, for this job.

2:04But what bad hiring looks like is one person comes in and they tell you what you want to hear and you hire them. Because you get it off your to-do list and it doesn't work that way. You've got to be willing to interview multiple people to make a good hire. I just did a hiring a couple years ago for two critical hires and I had staffing agencies help me and I was running ads everywhere and I probably interviewed 25 people to hire two. I don't live in a huge city. That's a lot of people to interview. But those two hires I made are still with the company and they're unbelievable. I didn't. I did not waste a hire. It's no longer to make the hire. So again, common mistakes in bad hiring is you hire the first person who looks good. Second is that you make a bad hire because you don't put any money aside to make a good hire. In other words, you're cheap.

3:06You're so frugal that you box yourself in and you're just happy somebody's willing to take what you're offering. I've said this before, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. You cannot listen to me. This is a business axiom. You cannot overpay a good hire. You can't. It's the person you hire that can't do the job that costs you money. It's never the person who's talented. A talented people do two jobs. Talented people bring a winning culture to your company as a bonus. A talented person brings happy customers to your company as a bonus. So don't be so cheap again. They don't budget. There's no budget to hire anybody great. That's a common mistake in bad hiring. Number three, I find is that you don't give a trial period. Whenever I can get away with a trial period and trust me, I try to sprinkle this in with

4:10every hire. Even if it's something like, listen, why don't we both try this for like 60 days and make sure this is a good fit? Not to do some formal agreement, but I want them to know that, hey, I am looking at your first, you know, this period and I'm really looking to see if you can do the job. Listen, people rarely get better after the first 30 days. They may understand the job a little bit better, but trust me, if they're lack of days of physical, they're late, they take a day off, they're capacity to do more than what you expect. All those things you're going to discover very quickly. Good hires are like Pac-Man. They want, they want to do everything inside. You can't give them enough work. They're asking for more work, okay? So if you can give a trial period, all right, number four, vetting their application and where they're resume. How many times have you hired somebody and they had references and you never called? And if you had called you to found out that they over-promised at their last position

5:13or they just didn't get along with people or they weren't very reliable and you can go on and on and on, it doesn't hurt to make a couple phone calls. Better to find out on the front end than on the back end. So just vet their application, even in the interview process, kind of go through that resume with them and get the stories of why they left places. You know that it's important, okay, a resume. It shows that they're qualified for the job, but it tells a story. It shares with you their employment story. So you need to vet their applications and or their resumes. And I have my staff do this before. I get the person. So typically by the time they make it to me, we've already front loaded the work on this. All right, next, hiring average people and not exceptional people. And listen, this is different than hiring the first person who looks good. First person who looks good is exactly what I'm saying.

6:15First person you interview, you think can do the job, you hire them. You cancel all the other interviews or you don't even, you never plan to interview more than one. Okay, you were going to hire the first person if they were breathing. If they, you know, could make it in there alive, you were going to hire them. That's different than this, hiring average people and not exceptional people. This is what I said is if you couldn't hire a seven, okay, you couldn't hire seven and nobody below a seven, would you hire the person in order you can only hire eight, it's nine and tens. The problem is we hire too many sevens, average people, you hire, rarely become exceptional people. So stop hiring, average people, hey listen, I understand there's some jobs that don't require exceptionalism, I'm fully aware of that. But even when I hire average, I look for an exceptional, intangible that they have. I have somebody works for me now, average, but the intangibles are unbelievable.

7:20Why? They have the gift of service. What is that? They love helping people. They just go the extra mile to help customers. I didn't get that in the interview process. I got average, but I got saw this person was friendly and it was a very middle of the road job. But during the interview, I could, I sense something better about that. There was something in some intangibles that we're going to make this person, exceptional. So again, don't just hire average. If they come in, they look, average try to draw out some intangibles that make them, that slides them into that number eight. Okay. Next, common mistakes in bad hiring is you don't clearly define their responsibilities. Okay. Listen. I want to tell them this is what I expect. If I'm hiring Santa. Okay. Listen. Do you love red velvet?

8:21Are you genuinely heavy? Do you like hanging out with rain deers? Is that a real white beer? Nah. I'm being funny, but you know what you're looking for? Hire that person and define their responsibilities exactly what you're looking at. This is what I'm looking for. This is what this hire is expected to do. This is what your responsibilities are. And then this, do you confidently think you can do them? You'd be surprised when you look them in the face and you ask and they head drops or you don't get that, they kind of turn to the side or they go, well, you know, I think I could do this one, but I'm not so sure about this one. Listen, I do everything I can to expose weakness in the interview. Because if we're six weeks into it and I've already kind of hinted at a trial period, I come back to them and they go, remember that responsibility I shared with you that I wanted you to be able to do AMB. And you weren't quite sure why I'm sure now that you can't do it. You're not good at that. And that is a key part of this hiring and I thought maybe you'd pick it up, but you have

9:24it picked it up, okay? So you need to define the responsibility and make sure they're confident that they can do it. Again, these are just common mistakes that I've found in bad hiring. Let's run through them really quick, they hire the first person, first person who comes in who looks good, actually they don't even need to look good, hire the first person. Number two is they don't have, they don't have an adequate budget to hire a good person. Number three is they don't give a trial period, if you can get a trial period, get a trial period. Number four is they don't vet the application and or the resume, okay? Number five, you hire average people and not exceptional people, okay? And then finally, number six is you need to clearly define the responsibilities and make sure the hire is confident they can do them. Again, these are the common mistakes that people make hiring and your company is as only as good as the people that toil inside with you. So make better hires. This is Sean Castorino with the 10 minute entrepreneur podcasts, this one of our teaching

10:26editions, which I love doing, I thank you just for listening, I hope it does make you a better entrepreneur, follow the podcast, subscribe to it like it, it continues to grow. Again, I want this to be the one thing that you're listening to every week that's making you a better entrepreneur, making you a better business owner. Again, I thank you so much, we will talk again soon.