Have you ever planned for a long vacation with your family?
Different family members have different takes on what “planning” looks like. Some consider remembering toothpaste to be above and beyond, while another individual who shall remain nameless would label socks if given a chance.
Who do you think everyone goes to on day two of vacation when something is needed?
Starting well (using a list to pack) ends well (everyone survives the trip, and our family remains in harmony with memories to cherish for years.)
Leaders say they want to hire the best person for the job, but they’re genuinely saying they are selecting a good person from the applicants they received.
At Development and Leadership Coaching, we have four stops on a hiring tour:
- Identify people who do extraordinary things.
- Invite them into our world. Discover who they are.
- Ensure they fit the life we are calling them into.
- Help them start well so all ends well.
Hiring is the most important thing you do.
A wise mentor taught me never to hire those who wash over the ship’s bow.
If you think of an organization as a ship plowing through the water, as we move through the world, move through our culture, people wash over the ship’s bow as they become aware of us, as they become aware of a job opening or job posting.
Look out into the ocean instead of focusing on those washing over the bow.
How?
Get everyone involved.
The ideas and action steps I am calling you to in the following few paragraphs are overwhelming.
Get your entire team involved.
The sooner you approach this as an all-in approach, the more effective your organization’s efforts will be.
Make asking for referrals a lifestyle.
Ask everyone in your organization to provide you with referrals.
We tend to think of this when we’re under pressure.
Cultivate a healthy habit of welcoming referrals from everyone involved with your organization year-round, not just during open enrollment, fundraising drives, or surprise vacancies.
How?
Schedule specific seasons on the calendar to meet with people as teams to identify potential people to add to your potential hiring list.
These are not people looking for a job – just incredible people you remember.
People are busy. Marking off time on your calendar shows everyone how important referrals are to the entire team.
You can send emails asking for feedback and names, but very little will happen.
You must get people to stop and think about the amazing people they’ve seen.
Phenomenal teachers, incredible volunteers, and extraordinary college students are currently filling roles in other organizations.
Establish a database.
Nothing fancy.
You’re making a list—a searchable table.
The principle here is to avoid the time crunch and frantic job postings.
When you need someone, it is too late to identify amazing people. You’re just hoping that they will fall out of the sky.
We serve a gracious God. He will often send amazing people to you.
But I would rather you be in a position like Gideon with God saying, “Let’s sort through these folks. Let’s send some of them home. Let’s cut this down to the core.”
You do this by altogether avoiding the pressure of time and the pressure of promoting with a posting and seeing who comes your way.
The more you can do to avoid that anxiety, the better you’re doing in your organization where everyone’s involved.
Calculate the cost of getting a hire wrong.
Conservative estimates place the cost of getting a hire wrong at 30% of a first-year salary.
The more difficult it is to find a person for a position or the more responsibility that position carries, the more expensive it would be to hire someone.
At the executive level, where large search firms are often brought in, it can be two, three, or even four times an entire salary because of the expense of trying to find that person over time and all it entails.
Define the role with crystal clarity.
What is the most important decision a leader makes? When asked, management theorist Peter Drucker responded,
“Who does what.”
The leader defines the job and then chooses the person to do it.
Clarity starts at the leadership level.
You must ask:
Who am I as a leader?
Who am I growing to become?
What is our organization growing to become?
Become a leader people want to work with. Become an organization people want to make a part of their life.
Influential leaders have no more than five ultimate responsibilities. Beyond that, over time, an organization will struggle.
At any given time, leaders have between sixty and eighty projects they are responsible for, along with countless tasks.
The problem is when people jump right into a job description without thinking through the job responsibilities at the leadership level and the various roles they fill, including the projects and tasks inside those roles.
Each time you hire, your goal must be to check yourself out of one of those to-do boxes.
If you’re the founder of a Christian school, there might have been a day when you were the founder, teacher, and admissions person. You checked the boxes. You worked your way out by hiring for the boxes.
If you’re the founder of a ministry, you might be the executive with the board, the chief fundraiser, the program director, and the person doing the day-to-day work. Hire people. Check those boxes. Work your way out of extra roles.
This is an exaggeration, an oversimplification of roles in an organization.
Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, said, “You’re either selling chicken, or you’re helping someone who does.”
Selling chicken creates revenue. Helping those who sell creates margin. Working together, these two roles create value.
I love the simplicity of a successful company with countless positions and roles to put things in perspective.
In ministry, value is the impact on the lives of what you do.
If your organization has a budget of half a million, you are responsible for $251 an hour. That’s not what you’re paid but what you’re responsible for.
How do you create value in your mission and people’s lives by ensuring that the maximum impact of that $251 occurs?
If you have a million-dollar budget, that’s $502 an hour.
A $2 million budget, $1,004 an hour; a $3 million budget, $2,008 an hour.
I hardly ever see people bring up that level of responsibility.
The next time you’re on Instagram for an hour, remember to think about the value you created from the $251 you were responsible for in that hour.
I don’t know about you, but that corrects me. That calibrates me.
If you can put that kind of value on time with money, imagine the value of time in your life that God places on it.
Discover the real person, not the best person.
We all want to hire the best person.
The reality is that’s not what we’re going to get.
You get who people really are. Hiring processes do not show this.
So, what can you do? There are a few things.
Start by building a shared decision-making process instead of a traditional hiring process. When trying to select someone to work with you and your organization, remember they are also selecting you. Everyone has a decision to make, and it’s safe to assume everyone wants the best possible outcome because the cost, emotionally and financially, is profound.
It is helpful to suspend formality as much as possible. For example, do not explicitly call interviews but create conversations.
Focus on relationship building. The more time you have, the more effective that will be. If the calendar or an open position pressures you, you will not have the time.
Avoid interviews as an assessment. Build authentic relationships. See if this person is authentic. They will not show you who they are in the interview process.
Creating a selection culture that this person’s selecting us as much as we are selecting them is impactful.
Create projects, opportunities, or invitations instead of formal applications.
Invite a teacher that you’ve had your eye on to come to teach teachers. Invite a teacher to be a substitute. Invite a student-teacher into the school long before a position is open.
Give people a project to complete with real work, tangible outcomes, and real implications. If it’s a development person, have them take on a short-term project. If it’s an event coordinator, get them involved in creating an invitation.
Look at the cost of getting it wrong. Put a number on it.
It’s right in your budget. You can see where you made the wrong decisions and spent money.
Remember, they are interviewing you, your company, your culture, your community, your chemistry, and your character the same way you are getting a feel for them.
I love how Mark Miller put it in his latest book, “Selection should bring differences of strengths and backgrounds. So our cultures blending together make something beautiful.”
Starting well with a team member brings an ending all parties will appreciate and grow from.
Keep moving forward. Let me know how this encourages you!