How to Hire A Great Employee

Have you ever wondered how to hire a great employee or who you should hire when starting a business?

No matter what size your company is right now… hiring one GREAT employee will change your company.

In fact, knowing how to attract and onboard talented team members, can grow your company’s bottom line faster than almost any other task you could focus on.

And knowing how to work with your CURRENT team so they can become drivers to your growth will give you a level of freedom that most entrepreneurs only dream of.

Two Common Hiring Strategies

Most companies fall into one of two categories when it comes to hiring employees:

Either they put an ENORMOUS amount of time and money into attracting, and interviewing, and hiring, and training people.

Or they think hiring the right people takes so much time and money that they do the absolute minimum just to get by – which is by putting ads online, and interviewing a bunch of candidates, and then just hiring the best FROM THAT SMALL GROUP OF APPLICANTS.

Both can work.

But one’s very costly and one’s way too risky.

So I’m going to give you a few bullet points to show you how we develop strong, motivated, loyal teams inside of each of my companies, and this works for startups as well as high 8-figure businesses.

And if you follow these tips – you will be LIGHT YEARS ahead of most other companies.

Before You Hire

First – before hiring… we create a strong culture.

Because no matter what you read in books or hear at a seminar, in the real world of scaling companies – Growth is more about CULTURE then it is about TEAM, because GREAT team members are attracted to the right culture.

THE BEST team members are highly attracted to GROWING companies. So your culture needs to be built around a quality MISSION that gets everyone excited, and gives everyone the ability to work as a team to accomplish something great.

Now I know some of you are going to have questions as we go through this, so if you have questions – write them in the comment section on YouTube here and either I’ll answer you there – or if I get a lot of the same questions, I’ll put a video together for whatever we need to go deeper on…

But AFTER you put together a simple, yet motivating MISSION – invite the right people to join your team.

You’ll have to remember something here… when your culture is strong, great people are attracted to your company, and those people are NOT looking at the online classifieds. You’ll find great employees at trade shows, through vendors, on LinkedIn, and you’ll also find them working at your competition. But your BEST next employee hire is probably not searching through the online classifieds.

So stop wasting time just posting ads and hoping the right people will show up – make a plan to actually GO AFTER the people you want on your team.

Selecting The Right Candidate

Third, hiring the right people is never a 1-interview process.

Most of our interviews take 2-3 meetings before an offer is made, and one of those meetings might be off-site (or out of the office) so I can see how they handle themselves in a less professional environment.

For example – how do they treat the waiter at our local restaurant. If they treat them like crap – I doubt they’ll be a good fit in any of my companies!

Next, job candidates should never be told what the salary is until after you’ve met with them, and interviewed them, and discovered their true talent-level, and maybe even introduced them to your team so both you and they can see if there’s a fit.

What we almost ALWAYS find is that the best team members will work for less… after they feel like there’s a really good fit for them at your company. And once they come on board, they can have an instant and dramatically positive impact on your growth.

Onboarding A New Hire

But what about – after they’re hired?

After someone comes on board – we need to show them that we value them, and their time, and their input. We always find a reason to give our team the credit for anything the company achieves – because the more our team feels like THEY’RE part of our growth – the harder they’ll work to drive our company higher.

Meet with them often… we have meetings every day – and they’re fast, and everyone comes prepared to give input on how THEY are going to help boost the growth of the company that day or that week or that month… so everyone is focused in the right direction… every day.

Now in our meetings – we whiteboard everything because it makes concepts simple for everyone to understand. Remember, your goal is to make each piece of the puzzle transferrable – so it’s off your plate and so your team takes ownership. They can only do that if everything is super clear for them. Whiteboarding helps to clarify everything.

Also, understand this… and I learned this from a very good friend of mine who says: there’s good decisions, bad decisions, and no decisions… the worst decision is no decision – the second worst is a bad decision.

Your team must be trained to make decisions, and not condemned when they make a bad decision.

Bad decisions just require MORE TRAINING… but people who CAN’T make a decision usually can’t get better through training.

So when you’re training a new person, remember that they’re drinking through a fire hose (meaning – you’re downloading a ton of information to them – some of which is just naturally going to be forgotten) so 3-4 weeks after every training, we do a follow-up meeting to make sure they got it all.

That helps ALL new team members to gain momentum MUCH faster!

Finally – you need to scale their pay when needed.

Most great team members are hungry. They want to plant roots with your company and be part of your growth, and they want to be well rewarded for THEIR PART in that growth.

But this is where so many companies go wrong. They assume that their team only wants MONEY as their reward – but that’s RARELY true!

WHAT A GREAT EMPLOYEE WANTS MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE IS TO BE PART OF A GREAT, GROWING, SMART TEAM – AND BE RECOGNIZED FOR THEIR PART OF THAT GROWTH.

To sum up – no matter what size your company is right now… Hiring one great employee can dramatically grow your company.

Knowing how to attract and qualify the best candidates (like we just discussed) can grow your company’s bottom line and streamline your organization faster than almost any other task you could focus on.

Learning how to work with your current team so they can become drivers to your growth will give you a level of freedom that most entrepreneurs only dream of.

On the other hand – hiring just one wrong person for a job, can be a financial disaster and can quickly become a VIRUS that spreads through your team. One that slows or STOPS your growth completely.

If you have a story about a great employee, or about an employee who became a virus – share it in the comment section here so we can all learn and help each other grow from it.