I interviewed an “A” player but the team passed on her. In retrospect, I should have brought her in. How do I get my team to recognize and embrace bringing on high-quality talent when recruiting employees?
Thoughts of the day:
Make sure your team is confident in their roles. Define the goals that need to be met and the talent that is required to get to those goals. Give the team a payoff for hitting the ball out of the park. Get everyone up to speed with how to search, qualify and hire great candidates when recruiting employees.
Assess your team members.
- Are your team members comfortable in the roles they hold?
- Do employees understand how they can continue to grow with the organization?
- What to do when employees want to keep growing?
- Ensure employees understand the payoffs that come with personal development?
If you can answer “yes” to all of the following questions, you’re halfway home to getting your team focused on hiring great talent. If there are any “no” answers, put time and energy into figuring out what’s wrong.
- Do you have the right people, just not all in the right jobs?
- Are any of the team members in over their heads and in need of rescuing?
- Any team members that spend time defining themselves by putting others down?
These are all common management problems that need to be fixed before you move on to add more talent disruption to the mix.
Do a careful assessment of every key player in your organization.
Work with each team member on a growth path, and a plan to work to achieve that growth path. For any team members who are struggling, pair them up with someone else who is strong in the areas they’re weak at. Give them time to develop additional skills and carefully assess how well they’re doing at tackling the opportunities you put in front of them. Reinforce an understanding of respect, integrity, striving to achieve more, and helping others succeed are all values you expect to see every day.
Help your team members by setting goals for both the company and the talent pool recruiting employees.
Map out one-, two- and three-year goals at a minimum. Define where the business is going and how to get there. Involve your team members in mapping out the plan of attack. Talk about how much and what kind of additional talent will be needed in order to achieve those goals. Encourage team members to identify talent gaps that must be filled in order to achieve success.
Instead of rewarding individual performance, set up bottom-line rewards.
If the company grows and improves, the bottom line will improve. Offer to share a portion of that increased net income with everyone on the team. Help everyone understand that once basic salaries are handed out, the big rewards will come from hitting the ball out of the park in terms of growth of revenue and increasing profit.
Define the future positions that need to be filled and build training plans for people to grow into those jobs.
When there isn’t enough time to train someone or there isn’t anyone interested in growing into a particular job, that’s where the team needs to focus its hiring efforts on recruiting employees. Make hiring great talent a group goal with group rewards. Your team should have the training it needs so they have great search and hiring skills. Encourage everyone on the team to work on building a talent bank to draw upon in future years. Gather names, identify great resumes, regularly talk with potential candidates — that’s everyone’s job if the company is going to ultimately build its “A” team.
Looking for a good book?
Try “The Best Team Wins: Build Your Business Through Predictive Hiring” by Adam Robinson.
