As a CEO hiring is probably your most important job. There is only so much you can do by yourself, and you need to build an incredible team around you.
There is a huge variation in talent. Some people can be 10x better than other people. It’s so important to find these exceptional people. Multiplied across the company this can have the biggest impact. It can help raise up the company and motivate others and find massive and new opportunities.
Making a bad hire can be devastating for a company. If you hire someone who doesn’t fit in the company or who has mediocre performance, then it can impact others, make them less productive and cause huge problems.
Most of the people who are looking for jobs are not that good. That’s why they are looking for jobs. The really best people are not looking for jobs because they have ample opportunities. So its really important to filter through most of the people who are actually below average.
It’s also great to learn from some of the best companies about how they hire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1l25ae75V4&ab_channel=ThePeopleAroundUs
The best book I read about hiring was this book by Lou Adler
In the book he provides a load of models and ways to think about how to hire the right person.
To summarise it:
– Be super clear about what you want that person for.
– Answer a series of question about that person and the target person and it will help you find that person.
– Most job ads are really boring and not very good. It’s better to write a job ad that is focused on what the challenges and tasks are.
– Be objective about evaluating the right person. An interview is not a very good way to assess people. He mentions the work experience interview and says that trying to hire the best people is basically about looking through how they developed in their
– I’ve incorporated a lot of these into how we hire at China Admissions. You can see the job ads here. I’ve had a lot of people say that they like our job ads because it looks more interesting and stands out.
- Being clear about what you are looking for
- Strategy and process for finding talent
What I’m looking for at China Admissions
Our accountability chart is below: (thanks to Traction from Gino Wickman).
I am currently involved in too many areas of the company and it is taking too much of my time which means I’m not really doing it that well compared to if someone is doing it full time. If there was someone focusing on it full time they would be able to do a much better job and I can also help out. At the same time I think we are lacking in our product design and overall experience. So I’m looking to attract people who can fill those roles. The product and student sales areas are the main places I’m hiring talent for.
1) Product Manager:
I’m looking for someone who can manage the product, design, and tech. They have to be full stack – as a startup company it’s important that they can do multiple things at the same time. If they can do front end / design it would be great so we can save on hiring too many people right now. I’m going to prepare for the job ad for this person.
2) Student Recruitment:
Looking for someone who can manage the overall student recruitment they should also be full stack. They key metrics is the number of students that are applying on our platform. There is a lot of inquiries and they should be good at automating the platform and also able to contact. This is a multi-skilled position.
Two birds with one stone? There is quite a lot of cross over with the two roles so it might be better to combine them into one role. It could actually be possible to find these two skills in the same person (that’s what I’m doing). It can be possible to have a great product manager who can help to manage the overall experience of the platform for students and for our team.
I have three strategies for solving this problem:
1) I will work on developing the product and student recruitment as much as possible.
2) I’m also looking to try to grow this from within the company right now.
3) I should also look outside for this:
– Looking for a great product manager to help develop and grow the platform focusing on student recruitment and the student experience, able to hire and build a team around them. They would have experience creating and managing products before, and have experience working with customers. They should be entrepreneurial and have probably built a company or platform themselves and grown it.
Plan for hiring
My plan for hiring now is to:
- Spend some time to think about this person, using the tools from traction
- Write out the job description clearly
- Post it on job boards (linkedin, local job boards etc.,), and also reach out to people in my network who might be suitable or who have applied to us before or who might have some advice or who might know someone suitable
- Do the reviews of new applicants, and set up times for the phone calls, and then interviews
- Would be great if they can do some kind of test project first.
