5 Hiring Tips Reviewed – Which Ones Actually Make Sense?
In this video, Matt reacts to a list of “5 Things You Need to Know Before Hiring Employees” — and let’s just say, not all of them hold up. The first tip? Absolutely essential. The second? Head-scratcher. The rest? Mostly vague statements. Matt breaks down what actually matters when hiring your first (or 100th) employee and where this advice completely misses the mark.
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
5 things you need to know before hiring employees. The first thing is you need to, before you ever hire anyone, you need to clearly define the role that you’re hiring for and clearly define what success looks like in that role. The second thing is never hire the first person that you interview. Never do it. The third thing is that when you do hire that person, your workload is not going to decrease. In fact, it’s going to increase. The fourth thing is hiring is expensive. It can cost thousands of dollars just to get a new hire. And #5 is a belief that I think a lot of business owners have. That is, your business is not immediately just going to grow and you’re not immediately just going to have a ton of free time because you make your first hire. It’s to allow you to focus on things that are going to grow the business and move it forward so that you can spend your time and attention on higher ROI activities.
Matt’s Review:
Okay, this is the kind of advice where it starts out sounding good and then there’s some real head-scratchers thrown in there. I absolutely think that in order to be successful for any hire, whether it’s your first employee or your hundredth employee, you need to have the role clearly defined. Why are you hiring this person? What do you expect them to do? And what do you expect the output to be that’s going to make it look like they did a good job? If that’s not clearly laid out if you don’t clearly explain it to them and then give them the tools and the training to be successful and set clear expectations and regularly follow up and monitor, then any failure or shortcomings they have, it’s really on you as the employer, not the employee. And definitely write it down. I think those are all important things, those are all must-haves for being a good employer and being able to hire well. But then, number two was don’t hire the first person you interview. Well, why not?What if they’re amazing? What if they happen to have all the qualities you’re looking for and check all the boxes?Just because they’re first, don’t hire them. I think what he means is don’t just jump into it, don’t just take whoever shows up first and give them the job and assume it’s gonna work out. But ideally, the first person you interview is not the first resume you looked at. Ideally, you’re looking at at least 10 to 20 resumes for each one interview you do, and then generally speaking, At least two or three people should be interviewed for the job, but it might be that the first interview that you have really is the best fit and that’s the right person to hire. So some of this advice just doesn’t make sense. Yes, everybody you hire is going to take work to train and get up to speed, so it’s not going to immediately decrease your workload. It is going to cost money, which is why you want to be careful about who you hire so you don’ts spend a lot of time and money bringing on somebody who’s not gonna be a good long-term fit. The first one made a lot of sense, the second one made no sense, and the next three just sounded like statements rather than things you must do or things that you must be careful about or things that you should do to hire the right person. So, this was sort of mixed-bag advice. Point one, though, super important.
