Hire the right person the first time

Hiring is difficult. 

It’s complicated, and confusing, and will take a long time. 

Here’s one way to simplify your hiring: start with essential skills. 

What are essential skills? 

Essential skills are the skills you need for the job but don’t have time to teach. 

You can teach somebody how to use a hammer to hang a picture, but you can’t teach them to be respectful of the client’s home if they don’t care about being respectful of the client’s home. 

It’s a lot easier to teach technical skills than personality traits and ingrained preferences. 

Before you start the hiring process, make a list of the essential skills needed for your business and for the role.

What are your essential skills?

Is there a list of standard essential skills that everyone should look for? 

Not really. While there are standard “good” personality traits to look for, like honesty and motivation, let’s consider them as baseline skills: don’t hire anyone who doesn’t have those traits by nature. 

The essential skills for your business are specific to your culture and your needs. The quickest path to your business’ essential skills is through your guiding principles. 

Choose three descriptions that represent your business, that describe how you want employees to behave, and suggest what you want clients to think of you. Those are your guiding principles. And they are the essential skills required to be successful in your business. 

What next

Write your three guiding principles. For each, add a sentence to describe exactly what it means. How do you know you have the right ones? Let’s get on a discovery call to review what you have and how to use it.