The people you hire are the ‘make or break’ for most companies and yet most business owners spend little or no time with this. The cost of a miss-hire is 23 x the hire’s annual salary. So for example, say you wanted a new admin to work 15 hours a week at $12 per hour; that’s $8,640 per year resulting in a cost of $198,720 if you miss-hire – a cost you need to avoid. 3 out of 4 people are miss-hires! And miss-hires affect businesses like yours the most because you’re generally hiring just 1 or 2 total and cannot afford to be off target with this; there’s no room for error!

So how do you avoid this? By avoiding these two frequent hiring mistakes:

1. Hiring people like you
2. Hiring people you like

Why? Because these are your biggest blind spots. Let’s talk first about why you shouldn’t hire people like yourself? Because they are probably very entrepreneurial like you and chances are they will work for you, learn from you, and then leave you to do what you do only better then you! Congratulations, you have just trained your competition.

Secondly, never hire people you like instantly because if you hire people you like they won’t get as much done. People who are smooth talkers don’t get as much done (why do you think I am after you to hire some help?). Smooth talkers seem to be doing a lot but the results aren’t there.

Focus only on one type of possibility when hiring – the “star”. 10% of all applicants hold the possibility of being a “star”. What are the qualities of a star? The most important quality is that they be a ‘DRIVER’. Being a driver is not: someone who waits for you to hand out assignments, someone who constantly shifts responsibility, or someone who confuses activity with results (very common).

A driver is: someone who has a sense of personal responsibility for themselves and delivers results, someone who is pro-active and asks, “is there something else I can do?” and someone who is persistent and determined; they don’t stop.

When hiring, take a good look at their career history looking for patterns of responsibility.

After you have taken a leap of faith – watch and see if they are producing results; you know – getting their job done. Below is a suggestion for keeping an eye on results.

Request a daily report containing 3 things:

1. What have you worked on today and what were your results?
2. What were the challenges, problems you ran into?
3. What questions do you have for me?

Then, sit down and answer their questions once.

What will happen over the next 30 days is this – you’re going to find out if they are a driver! You’re going to find out so much about them over the next 30-days that you will quickly know if you have hired the right person or not. And, if not – fire them quickly.

HIRE SLOWLY – FIRE QUICKLY!

Finally, beware of any employee who establishes job security by creating “black boxes” where they are the only one who knows how to operate from within. Each hire should be responsible for creating or tweaking a “systems” manual (a document containing the EXACT process required for their job including checklists and forms) for their specific job. This prevents unnecessary voids in the company including being at a loss if the hire leaves!

Good luck with delegation; it really truly WILL DOUBLE YOUR INCOME.

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