Epic Entrepreneurs

Crafting the Ultimate Team: The Secret to Hiring for Entrepreneurial Success

• Bill Gilliland

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Discover the transformative power of meticulous hiring to unlock the freedom and flexibility you've been dreaming of as a business owner. This week's conversation is all about ditching the lazy approach to recruitment, sparked by my own eye-opening adventure in seeking a marketing manager. Through my experience, we'll dissect the crucial steps to attract stellar candidates and why the common "post-and-pray" method falls short. We'll navigate the art of marketing your open positions, handling a flood of applications, and the paramount importance of clarity in the 'who' and 'what' when fishing for that diverse pool of potential hires.

Strap in for a masterclass on building your dream team, whether they're just around the corner or across the globe. We're peeling back the layers on how to effectively cast your recruitment net far and wide, ensuring you snag not just any team member, but the right one. From local talent to virtual mavens, this episode is brimming with actionable insights to help you construct a robust team that propels you towards your entrepreneurial aspirations. Don't miss out on these golden nuggets of wisdom that could spell the difference between merely running a business and leading a powerhouse.

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Bill:

Welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs Powered by Action Coach Growth Partners. You likely went into business to have more freedom and flexibility so that you could spend more time with your family, do more things or travel or enjoy your hobbies or whatever it is that you like to do in your spare time. We're here to help you find better ways to make more money, build better teams and get that time back so that you can have that freedom and flexibility. We'll help you simplify things and make sense of business, investing and wealth building so that you can be epic and achieve all your dreams and goals. And now enjoy the show. Hey there, hope you're having a fantastic week.

Bill:

Most of the time when I'm doing these videos and podcasts, I'm talking about always being like becoming something else, but sometimes you need to stop a few things in order for you to become something else, in order to create the room to become something else. So today, I want you to stop being lazy in your hiring. Let me tell you a story. So I decided that we needed a full on marketing manager, and the reason I decided that is because I was the marketing manager. Hey, I'm a business owner. I'm running a company. The truth is I am not an expert in digital marketing. I know enough to coach people on it. I know enough to know when to get experts. I also know that I was doing it part time and therefore being the manager part time is not working. I had sugars, my friend told me. He said look, if you're not getting the results you want in an area, it's likely because you don't have anyone in charge and I added the coddle or you've got someone in charge who is incompetent or can't put their full energy into it. So I knew I couldn't put my full energy into marketing because I've also got a business, a couple of businesses to run and I've got some coaching. So what makes sense? It makes sense to hire somebody, but let me explain to you a hiring process that works and why you shouldn't be lazy. What I see too many people doing is just putting an ad out, getting resumes in, reading resumes, doing some interviews, hiring somebody. You need to put in the work to hire the right person. What is more important, your people are just getting someone in the slot. So let's talk about how to do this right and how you can stop being lazy and do the work and hire the right people.

Bill:

So here's the story. I wanted this marketing manager. Now what do you do? First, the first thing you do is you figure out who you want. You want to market for these people. So who do you want? Get clear on who you want, get clear on their attitudes, get clear on their skills, get clear on all the other characteristics. Make a list of the 60 things you want in this person. That's the who. Do that before you even figure out what you want them to do. The second thing is figure out what you would like for them to do. What are the outcomes that you want? You may not know exactly the details of everything they need to do day to day, but you're going to figure out the outcome. So get the who and get the what. So once you've got that, then you can go market.

Bill:

Now, where are you going to market? You should tell friends, you should ask for referrals. You should put it on social media. You should put it on all the digital versions like Indeed and LinkedIn and those kind of things. But you should not just put it in one place. You want to fish with a net, want a whole bunch of candidates.

Bill:

Well, it turns out that I decided that this marketing person did not need to be local, so they could be anywhere in the world. Well, that opens up a world of possibilities of who could actually work for us. We're a bit of a virtual firm, anyway. Most of our team works from their home, except when they're out, you know, meetings and networking and that sort of thing. So we already had the setup to hire a virtual marketing person, and so here's what I did I put it on Indeed.

Bill:

Now, once you get clear on this, let me tell you what happened. You get tons of applications. In fact, I was so clear and so and it was such a hot item and so many people want to do it I got 239 replies, people who press the button. See, that's what you're waiting on. You think that you just that a lot of people just think they can press the button and apply for a job. Well, so that 239, I had so many in two days I cut off the end, and then what I did was I asked them to make me a video and explain to me a couple of things about themselves and why they wanted the job, why they thought it was a good fit for them. Well, I went from 239 to 14. That just got rid of all the lazy people, all the button pressures, all the people that thought they oh well, maybe I'll just apply for a job and I'll get them. So I'm down to 14.

Bill:

Then we set up a group information and interview session on Zoom. Nine showed up for that. Okay, we did the information session, did the interview session piece of it, I cut it. They were all decent, they were all had skills, they all were pretty good. They had all gone through the process. So I cut it down and I asked the top five to send me a one page plan of how they were going to attack our marketing and generate the leads that we need to have generated to build our business. So they all five did it. I interviewed all five of them One on one. One stood out so I had an additional meeting with him and eventually we came to terms. I made him an offer and he's accepted the job.

Bill:

But you can see that that process I had to stop. Now I'm out selling, coaching, building businesses. I had to stop long enough to do it right, to take the time to be industrious, to not be lazy in my hire. So if you don't have process in your business to hire. That at least that detail, or maybe more detail, to get the right people on the bus. Remember, tom Peters says you got. I mean that. Tom Peters, good to great, said you gotta get the right people on the bus. He also said you need to get the wrong people off, but you gotta get the right people on the bus. The way to get the right people on the bus is to have a process that makes it a mutual thing so that there's a fit. So stop being lazy in your hiring. Do the work. You'll be glad you did and until next time, all the best.

Bill:

Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs. Here's four things you can do. First, you can listen every week on Biz Radio Mondays at one Second. You can subscribe to the podcast. Hey, you get it. The more subscribers we have, the more cool things we can offer you. Three you can also go out and give us a five star rating everywhere. And number four if you'd like a free copy of my book, the Coach Approach Five Principles to Build an Epic Business, just go to giftfrombillcom. It's your roadmap to building your Epic Business. That's giftfrombillcom. Until next time, all the best.