3 Ways to Ensure a Successful Hire

Who isn’t hiring today? And how do you make sure your new hires actually stick? Well, let’s talk through 3 ways to ensure your new hire is a success.

Good afternoon, Thomas Joyner with Business on Purpose here. Thanks so much for joining!

I recently sat in a coaching meeting with a business who had made some really important hires. But they were frustrated!

“It just seems like they’re spinning their wheels,” they said. “They haven’t really begun to own their job yet and I feel like I’m doing half of their work for them.”

“Well, walk me through how you set them up?”

It quickly got very quiet. They realized that they hadn’t done close to enough to set them up well to succeed in the new role.

This story is all too common. We know we need to set our employees up and our new hires up for success, but we just don’t do it for some reason. Now, many times it’s because we don’t know exactly what we want them to own when we make the hire. 

We realize that we’re overwhelmed and we think  more manpower immediately will help the problem. But that is nowhere close to true. Well-equipped manpower, well-trained manpower will help, but throwing more manpower at the problem is like handing someone a bike with flat tires and telling them you can get somewhere faster now. Yes, that’s true, but you need to pump up the tires and give them ALL the tools they need to succeed. Before they can truly get where they need to go!

So what do we need to do to ensure that our new hires thrive? Not just survive? It’s what we all want to know because everyone is hiring.

So…

1. Write out a Job Role

It MUST start here. So often, we make a hire and put a few thoughts down, and wing it as our new employees start. “We’ll just see what they’re good at,” we say. Instead of asking…”What does the business need them to do?” That questions should inform you of what needs to go on the job role. 

So write it all out. What are they responsible for owning? What does their day to day look like? You can even script out their first 2-3 weeks. Every hour, so they never have to guess what they should be doing! If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist. That means if you don’t write a Job Role down for a new hire, they will never know what they are held responsible for and, unless you make a 1 in a million hire, they will never accomplish what you hired them to do in the first place. But if you write down the Job Role, tweak as needed, and train on their responsibilities, you guarantee that they will at the very least know what they are being asked to do.

2. Build out their first 90 days of expectations

It never fails. Well, we had an employee evaluation at 90 days and they are barely keeping their head above water. Why? Because they don’t know what they were supposed to have learned in that time. Other than a few day to day items, odds are they don’t know the technical skills you’ve asked them to learn, the systems they were supposed to impact, the meetings they were supposed to lead. 

No, we fail our employees when we don’t tell them what the goal is at the end of 90 days. So they can ask questions and ask for help or clarity if need be. They have to know what our expectations are for them in the first 90 days so we can accurately tell whether they were the right fit for the role. If we don’t set them up accordingly, their failure is on us.

So what do these expectations need to have? Well, a weekly schedule for them, technical skills to know like sales software, industry contacts, workflow systems, you name it. The next set of expectations is on deliverables you need from them. Any accounts they need to sell to? Any budgets they need to work through or processes they need to write out? Lastly, what meetings and trainings do they need to attend or become competent in. If you can give them expectations for each of these, they will be led to the standard, not left to wonder where it is!

3. Schedule a weekly onboarding meeting to make small course corrections along the way.

You have to check in on them along the way. Set 30 minutes on the calendar and a meeting that neither of you can cancel. Ask them some simple onboarding questions. What are you seeing? Capturing their eyes at the beginning and seeing what they see is amazingly powerful. What questions do you have about your job role? Again, always supporting, always providing clarity. Do we have any blind spots? Allowing them to speak and put words to what their seeing and maybe improve an area you didn’t know needed it! And lastly, here’s what we see. A chance for you to praise and critique. To make small course corrections instead of sweeping your frustrations under the rug for months until the next employee eval. Give them small windows of things to change and then you have a record for months down the road. 

That’s it! If you can give them a detailed Job Role, build out their first 90 days of expectations and have a weekly onboarding meeting to course correct, you show them the pathway to success. Because here’s the thing... Yes, this takes time. Yes, this is hard work. 

But you know what takes more work? Starting over with a new employee. We have to equip the employees we have, equip the hires we make, not always give up, and looked for the already equipped hire! When we understand and act on that, we give our team the key to success. Clear expectations, detailed training, and a system to thrive within.

I hope that makes sense and I hope you can put this into practice the next time you make a hire. Thanks for tuning in, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and YouTube channel right now! 

Thanks