How to hire and grow your team

- Do you ever find yourself struggling to hire the right people? Today's guest has some tips to make hiring processes less stressful. Welcome to "HR{preneur}." I'm Jim Duffy. From main street to your street. The "HR{preneur}" podcast is centered around helping small businesses like yours gain the knowledge you need, from HR, payroll and hiring, to time, taxes, benefits, and insurance. Today we're talking about recruiting, onboarding and retention of employees.

We're joined by Clint Smith, Founder and CEO of CareerPlug. Clint started CareerPlug back in 2007, and today, works with businesses representing over 60,000 locations. CareerPlug Software is designed to help businesses hire and retain the right people they need to grow, which is often the number one challenge faced by small business owners. Clint has been there himself as a small business owner.

Many of the lessons he'll share today were learned the hard way through bad hires and other mistakes such as not having written core values. Clint, it's great to have you join us on "HR{preneur}." - It's great to be here, Jim. Thank you. - Terrific. Clint, so let's get started. CareerPlug works with over 60,000 small businesses and helped over 200,000 people get hired last year alone. So you obviously see what's working well in the hiring environment.

So where does a business need to start when they are starting to recruit? - Jim, you would think that you would start with a job posting, but we recommend that you start with understanding who you are and that you really have your culture well documented. For us, we define that as having your mission, your vision and your core values all clear. And then you also want to be able to answer this question, why would you wanna work here? Why would I want to come work for you?

And having those two things together I think is a really important foundation. The second piece you wanna understand before you actually write a job description is what are the most important characteristics that you're looking for in this person? And how do you think you're gonna be able to find them? We call that an ideal candidate profile. My one recommendation on that is don't list out 10 different things that you're looking for for the person.

It's okay if you wanna put some of those on the job description, but there's really one or two things that are gonna be critical for success in the role. Get a good understanding of what those are, and then have those as what you're really keying in on. Each person has no more than one or two superpowers. You wanna make sure that the person you hire matches up with the superpower that you really need for that role. - Clint, that's excellent advice and a great way to start the conversation here.

So my next question is,

after a business identifies who they need, how do they best get the word out and find the people they need? - I recommend that you start with a careers page. If you don't have a careers page associated with your website where people can come, learn more and apply to the job, that's the first place to start. And really that's taking all that stuff we talked about from the first question, your mission, your vision, your values, and just why does someone wanna come work for you?

And put that on a nice looking page and add some pictures of your team, maybe some testimonials, and then from there, you've gotta get that job posting out. Keep it simple, not too long. Make sure it's not just a list of everything that you're looking for. Write it from their perspective. What would they be looking for? What are you offering? And then get that job out there and promote it. Don't just go directly to the job boards promoted in your network first, that could be your employees.

If you have a retail store, it could be a sign that you put up for customers to be able to see and go and apply. We found that people from your network get hired at a 10 times higher rate than someone from a job board. But then you do wanna make sure you get out on the job boards as well. If you work with an applicant tracking system, they'll usually help you get to all those job boards automatically but if you wanna post directly, there's a number of options in there.

The bigger players are Indeed, ZipRecruiter, LinkedIn.

- So Clint, what else should a business know before they start advertising their openings? - They really should understand the compensation, Jim, and as well as benefits. I've been amazed at how many people post a job and they don't really understand how much someone's gonna be able to make by working with them. They'll understand, let's say, for a salesperson what the base salary is, but I'll ask 'em a question like, how much could this person make if they hit all their goals with you?

And they're not totally clear. So I would say that that's really important. I know ADP has some great tools to help you benchmark compensation. And then on the benefits side, benefits are a critical part of the equation as well. Being able to offer healthcare benefits, 401(k), and other benefits that don't even often cost you money, like flexible scheduling can go a long way in attracting people to apply to your job. - Clint, if we can switch gears to a related topic.

Can you please provide any advice for a business when they move into the interviewing or evaluating candidates? - Yes. First thing is act quickly. So don't assume that someone just applied to your job. They've probably applied to a number of jobs, and it's not always the best employer that wins, sometimes it's the first one that gets back to them. So being able to get back to 'em quickly, we recommend using texting over email, if at all possible.

You're gonna reach people faster and get a faster response. And then in terms of the actual interview process, the number one thing is use a scorecard and use a standard set of questions. Be consistent with how you're evaluating people. What we like to do and what we recommend is to have three segments. One that looks at ability, one that looks at their motivation, and one that looks at their culture fit.

And culture fit for us is really looking at your core values and saying, "How does this person match up against the core values that you have?" How well do they live those core values? - That's great advice.

So what about making the right decision? We know that the cost of hiring the wrong candidate and the cost of the wrong hire is high, and in some instances cripple a business. What can a business do to make sure they are making the right hire? - There's a few things that you could do here, Jim. I would say the first is make sure that someone really has a good understanding of the job on their end. Either take them on a tour or show them what it looks like to be able to sit in that role.

And then on the other side, if at all possible, try to get a work sample from them. If you're calling for someone who's gonna be doing support on the phone, maybe do a mock of support call with them. If you're hiring for a role that requires graphic design, take a look at their portfolio, make sure that you're comfortable with it. But really do that and then I would say conduct reference checks and background checks, both of them. They're both critical.

So talk to people who have worked with them before, preferably as a manager to validate what you've heard, and then run a background check, just to make sure that you know who you're dealing with. It only takes one mistake like that. You'll remember that forever. The last thing I'd say I'd do is to be able to have a, what we call a candidate defense.

And that is being able to run the hiring case by someone either on your team, or it could be a colleague, or someone else you know, outside of your business. They can help you see your blind spots and give you a different perspective on a candidate than you might have.

Ideally, you can have more than one person in your company and be involved in the hiring process, but if it's really just you as a small business owner, talk to someone else that you trust and get their advice and see how they look at the situation. - Okay. Excellent advice.

So a business has now made the right hire and they are ready to onboard the candidate. This is where so many businesses struggle. How does a business onboard a new employee the right way? - Onboarding, for most people, they think about that first day and getting those forms done and basically being compliant. But for us, we really look at onboarding as typically a 90-day process. And it's really comes down to connection.

It's building connection between the new hire and their company, the new hire and their team members, and then the new hire and the manager. And what we do is set up a series of workflows that builds connection with each one of those. So like for the company, it might be about connecting the new hire with that mission, the vision, the values, company history, being able to get assimilated that way.

With the team, it could be assigning them an onboarding buddy, making sure that they have someone that's looking out for them right from the start. And on the manager side, it's really about having an expectations interview and a job description review on that first day, being able to go and really talk about how does someone win with me? How does someone lose with me? How do I wanna be communicated with?

And be able to have that, learn that from the new hire, but then also share your expectations as a manager as well. We found that if you do all of those things really well, the chances of that person being in a thriving position and still with you at 90-days goes way up. - So Clint, thank you. This brings us to the end of this episode. And again, I want to give you Clint Smith, a special thanks. Clint is the Founder and CEO of CareerPlug for joining us.

And as a special gift for our listeners, any listener of this podcast can receive a free download of Clint's book entitled, "How to Hire" by simply clicking on the link in the podcast description. So Clint, once again, thank you very much for sharing that generous offer with our listeners. - It's my pleasure, Jim. Thanks for having me. - You bet. Hope to have you on again soon.

So presented by ADP, "HR{preneur}" focuses on the entrepreneurs and business drivers who are shaping the growth of their companies and positively impacting the lives of their employees. With each episode, we'll bring the experts to you, answer your questions, and help you think beyond today, so you can discover more success tomorrow. As always, thanks for listening to "HR{preneur}." Be well and we hope you'll join us again soon.