“If you could re-hire all of your team members tomorrow, would you?”
That’s a question you’ll have heard me refer to many times, and it’s a question I always put to my clients to get an immediate insight into the effectiveness of their hiring system.
It’s occasionally met with a resounding ‘yes!’ Sometimes with a resounding ‘no!’ But more often than not, with a pregnant and very telling pause…
Hire the wrong person, and you’re just building in pain, putting off the inevitable, and potentially unsettling the balance of your team.
How many business owners do you know who have someone they don’t want but have hung onto for years? Perhaps that’s you.
So how can you tell if you’re the right fit for someone and vice-versa?
The answer lies in the Right 1st time hiring system (http://bit.ly/2N9XhGQ), that I shared with you last week – made up of 3 stages:
1. Attract
2. Hire
3. Try out
And it’s that last crucial stage – the probation system – that I want to focus on over the next few weeks.
For me a simple, structured probation system is a no brainer, yet very few businesses give it the focus or attention that it deserves, and allow team members to simply drift into full employment.
Why do I believe it’s so important?
- Because it gives you the chance to try out the skills and attitude of your new team member, who may have ticked all of the right boxes at their interview.
- Because it gives you the opportunity to cut the chord while it’s still short if you need to – while it’s less painful for both you and your potential new team member.
- Because it may reveal that this person isn’t right for the role they were hired for, but it may show you that they’d be ideal for another role.
- Because it’s way cheaper in the long run. Hiring is such a big investment and I get that you might not want to start over if someone fails their probation. But the cost of re-starting your hiring process is nothing compared to the cost of releasing someone down the line. Or worse still the cost of keeping them in your team
- Because it gives you a consistent and structured way to assess the skills, attitude and values of your new recruit, and get to that all important stay/go decision after 3 months.
Over the next few weeks we’ll cover how to set up for a ‘memorable first day’, how to structure an effective training map, and how to give essential feedback both during and at the end of the probation period.
Do one thing: Download the Right 1st Time hiring system if you haven’t already, and then look out for next week’s blog that will share how to set up for that that Memorable First Day.
NB Your Hiring System is key to building your High performing team and is step 3 of a 9 step roadmap that we lead our clients along, to build the business-critical systems that will make your business scale-ready, and free you from the day to day of your operation.
To learn more about the 9 steps that will move you from slave to your business to scale-ready, visit: https://www.mariannepage.co.uk/chaos-to-consistency.html
