Quick pointers on hiring valuable employees

Hiring the right employee is difficult, but hiring the right employee for a startup is even harder.

The truth is that you have very little money and you have to make every dollar count. With each hire, you’re asking yourself, how will they directly affect revenue? How will they improve operations? How do they help you do your job as a founder better and faster?

Photo credit: Brooke Cagle

I’ve been very lucky to have hired great employees who have grown with me and my businesses. Even when they leave the company, they usually take on leading roles in other great organizations.

That’s why I’d like to share my personal hiring process. Hopefully, this will be useful for you.

You won’t get it right all the time

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had my fair share of bad hires.

There was one guy who actively tried to poach my staff for a competing firm he was setting up just after he was hired and trained. There was another employee who for weeks would steal our data at midnight, not knowing that our servers tracked and reported such activity daily. Another girl was always taking sick leaves – like a lot of sick leaves.

There’s always going to be that one person who holds your company to ransom at some vulnerable point in the business because they think they wield power. There will also be those who will have more subtle incompetence.

This guide will support your success, but it won’t serve to hold your hand through the entire process.

Replicate the process

I’ve researched and used so many different hiring tools to gauge employee future success: English tests, IQ or EQ tests, and even personality tests.

I’ve deeply reviewed resumes that have been clearly doctored by recruiters. I’ve sought reference checks (useless in Asia). I’ve added round after round of interviews for key hires to validate opinions. Over the years, I’ve distilled all of this into a step-by-step process:

Look out for red flags

This could look like the following:

• A lot of business buzz words without much real content
• A lack of clear achievements – key performance indicators (KPIs) or objectives and key results (OKRs)
• Job hopping with tenures of less than a year at previous companies
• Job details that are generic or even replicated across several roles
• Plateauing skills – Did they learn more or excel with each new promotion? Or did they stagnate and fail to acquire the necessary skills for the next level?