Is Your Firm Safe From A Terrible Hire?

Here’s a problem I bet you have.  You’ve hired a new staff member and three months after you hire them, you wonder if this person was even close to the person you interviewed.  You thought you had a real winner.  Instead you found your new hire is a dud.  Not necessarily the worst employee you ever saw but nowhere near what you expected.  If this sounds like an experience you’ve had read on.

You need a hiring system.

Hiring should not be an art form.  To hire well you need to use a system that allows you to systematize the hiring process.  If you follow a simple system that’s easy to implement the chance of you hiring a great staff member can go from 50/50 to over 80%.

Too often firm’s hire by using their gut.  Does this sound like you?  If so, understand that gut feeling can help and it should be part of what you use when you hire someone.  You need to have a repeatable system that you use for every single hire you make.

Your system needs to be simple.

If any system is too complicated it won’t be used.  Your hiring system needs to be something that can be explained in a few paragraphs.  You should be able to put the instructions for how your hiring process works on one page.  If it’s longer than that, it’ll be too complicated and it won’t be used.

Often I see wealth managers take something like hiring and make it much more complicated than it needs to be.  I bet you don’t think your system is complicated.  Here’s something I would like you to do.  When you go home tonight explain your hiring system to your spouse.  Then ask your spouse or significant other to tell you what you said.  If they can’t do it easily, then your system is too complicated.

Everyone in your firm needs to use it.

If you don’t require that everyone in your firm uses the same hiring system there’s a strong chance that at best your hiring is going to be uneven.  Once you adopt a system you want to test to make sure it works properly.  Overtime strategies and tools that will help your firm hire the type of people you’ve always dreamed about.

I know that when I went from having an ad hoc hiring system to the one we explain in our case study we went from getting lucky when we hired the right person to getting the type of person we wanted over 80% of the time. 

It was really pretty simple.  We wrote down in bullet point form who we were looking for in three areas.  We would then rate each trait on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being perfect.  We found that when we nailed the traits we were looking for we got the right person.  Is this something you would like in your firm?

Great hiring requires great discipline.

The problem when you start hiring with a system is that you’re going to find that others and even you might not want to use the system.  Running a system requires that you do the same thing every time.  In this instance I’m talking about hiring.  I could also be talking about how you do financial plans, onboard new clients or ask for referrals.  All should be systems and all require discipline for them to work.

You’re going to want to just wing it.  After all, isn’t hiring really an art?  Not in my world and I hope that it won’t be in your world.  You’re going to have an opportunity to get a free case study on how to hire for unique abilities.  Instead of me writing a couple of thousand words about how it works, just download the case study and you’ll see a truly simple system that will help you improve your hiring.

After you read the case study you’re going to find out how easy it is to hire really great people.  I’ve used this system for over 30 years.  Before I used it our hiring was terrible.  If we got someone that was good we were just lucky.  After we started using it, we rarely missed on getting the right person.  We only had to remember to use it.

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