How To Effectively Hire The Best Employees For A Start Up In Nigeria

Entrepreneurship is a shared idea. No entrepreneurial idea has been established without the help of other people. Even sole proprietorships need to hire people to help drive the idea home. In order words, employees are vital parts of every business. It is important that you hire the best employees.

They are part of very business idea. The large businesses are already established and find it difficult to fail, but the same cannot be said of the startups. The startups are very fragile and a mistake as simple as hiring the wrong employees can bring the business on its knees.

According to research, startup entrepreneurs identified finding the right employees as their biggest challenge.

You can get to the extent of inventing and even commercializing a business idea or concept all alone. With time, you will certainly get to the point where you cannot single-handedly perform all the tasks required to keep the enterprise going. Then you need to incorporate employees to offer some helping hand.

But the difficult part is getting hard-working individuals with the skills, attitude, and integrity needed to boost production and sales. The difficulty is how to hire the right employees.

Related: How to start tissue paper/serviette manufacturing in Nigeria

Hiring the wrong person has a spillover effect. It’s the norm in working places nowadays to constitute and work with teams. Teamwork has proven to be more effective and cost efficient in businesses.

However, having the wrong person in a team does not only affect the productivity of the whole team. It also affects the entire productivity of the business as teams are interdependent.So hiring the wrong employee can be a disaster to your business especially as a startup. On another ground, hiring employees for startups can be difficult as the process is always time-consuming, frustrating, and expensive when not done correctly.

Forbes has put the cost of hiring a bad employee at between $25 and $50,000, in a recent article.The above statements drive home the point that hiring the best people is now more critical than ever. If you make bad or biased hiring choices, you will lose a lot of time, money, and good results.

The process of Finding, interviewing, engaging, and training new employees require huge costs. Also you will need to get desks, computers, phones, and other related equipment for each employee. Most importantly, you will also need to make provision for salaries, taxes, and other benefits. After all the heavy expenditure, the only way to get back what you have invested in the hiring process is to select efficient employees that will bring results.

Owing to the high cost of hiring employees and the fact that the success of your business depend to a larger extent on the quality of employees, it can only be needful that you ensure maximum carefulness when hiring these employees. Below are the best tips to ensure you hire the best employees in your business.

What are the Best Way to Hire the Best Employees?

There are three ways to ensure you hire the best employees, thus;

• The traditional hiring method-:

This method is the most expensive and rigorous of the three. It has to do with the old method of placing vacancy adverts on bill boards, newspapers, and the rest, screening applicants face to face, conducting exams and interviews, training chosen prospects, etc.

• The online recruitment method-:

This is another method used to hire the best employees. This method involves same processes as in the traditional method but the processes will be carried out online. Thus saving cost, time and resources. This method usually favors small and medium scale enterprises, online businesses or stores, work from home jobs, etc.

• The outsourcing approach-:

In this case, the entire recruitment process is outsourced to a third party company, thus allowing the parent company concentrate on their core job. This is common with most multinational companies.

All of the methods discussed above have their advantages and disadvantages. None can be out rightly said to be better than the rest. It is best advised to choose which hiring method suits your company based on your objectives, goals, needs, capital at hand, and size of company.

As regards the best way to hire the best employees for your business, there is no clear-cut recommendation. The solution lies in between a set of strategies that can be efficiently combined for the best result. This is called “the 7 C’s formula”. The components of the formula is broken down below:

7 Key Traits to Watch Out For When Hiring Employees

1. Competence-: 

Does he/she have the necessary skills, experience, and education to effectively play the roles expected of him/her? This ought to be the first factor for consideration by any entrepreneur who aims at excellence. The efficiency of an employee depends totally on if they have the required skill set, experience, and education to carry out their duty effectively. You have to consider this when you want to hire the best employees

2. Capability-: 

Capability here means the employee having the potential for growth and the willingness and ability to take on additional responsibility. To hire the best employees, the quality and capability has to be considered. A quality employee should go beyond merely handling and completing tasks to putting in more effort and creativity in the process. It’s therefore required that the employee be able to show some level of capability.

3. Commitment-: 

To hire the best employees, the commitment is important. The right employee should be willing and ready to work with you for a long time. It’s only when the employee envisages a future with your business that he can give his best to building such business. You can verify an employee’s commitment to your business either by simple cross examination or checking his past employment records.

If you ask an employee where he wishes to find himself next five years and she responds that she wishes to find herself working with a bigger company or have started her own business, it simply means she lacks commitment to your business. Also if her job history indicates that she’s used to changing jobs on a regular basis, then she may just leave your business at will. These moves should help you employ the right people who are committed to the course of your dreams.

4. Character-: 

In the course of the hiring process, endeavor to test candidates for vital character traits like: honesty, patience, selflessness, integrity, submissiveness, and ability to play on well with a team. These are the character values that will promote effective team work and improve productivity in the long run. You should look out for those when you want to hire the best employees.

5. Compatibility-: 

It’s of importance to verify if the employee can get along well with colleagues, potential clients, customers, and partners. If he cannot get along well with these people, there is no need hiring him. This is because if you end up hiring him, he will bring bad blood to the system.

Also, you need to verify the willingness of the employee to get along with you as the employer and his willingness to accept and work in the environment that your business provides. These factors entail the compatibility of the employee and help you hire the best employees

6. Compensation-: 

To hire the best employees, ensure that your chosen candidate agrees to a fair compensation package that is in line with market rates. Otherwise, he will feel unappreciated and dissatisfied with the job, and this can adversely affect his productivity.

7. Culture-: 

All business enterprises have a unique way that its employees and management interact and behave with each other. This can be referred as the culture of such business entity. The culture of every business is based on the business’s policies, procedures, and values that influence the behavior of a leader and employees.

A candidate for employment in your business should reflect your company’s culture, otherwise he would turn out difficult and disruptive to your business in the end. Don’t forget this when you want to hire the best employees.

 

Hiring the Best Employees – 16 Lessons from the Mafia Manager

The book “The Mafia Manager.” Is a classic of a literary piece with so much business lessons and secrets to learn from it. Though there are many business lessons in the Mafia Manager but I will specifically be extracting the lessons on hiring good employees.The Mafia Manager is a book containing the distilled wisdom of men who have managed one of the largest, most profitable and long lived cartels in the history of capitalism.

The Mafia Manager gathers for the first time in one book the knowledge and percepts of the ruthless bosses whose genius at organization and management contributed far more to profitability and growth than the brute strength or conventional wisdom of the legitimate CEO. For those who have not read “The Mafia Manager”, please endeavor to do so because the wealth of knowledge stored therein is too good not to acquire.

Now, let’s make a meal of the 16 tips that helps you to hire the best employees as presented by the book;

1. It is not necessary to have a large family with many soldiers and button men. Its advised that you hire fewer employees and so as to avoid higher betrayals, costs and disappointments.
2. Ensure that every staff you hire is of the best possible quality than hiring many employees of less quality. One good man is, of course, better than a hundred fools.
3. Don’thire someone just out of school for a truly responsible job involving others in its performance, no matter how impressive his record. You actually need someone with that experience of working with others.
4. In cases of jobs less vital to the success of your organization, it’s advised that you hire a good attitude before experience, it’s required for good teamwork. You can test the candidate’s attitude in any way you feel, the ball is in your court.
5. Experts care more about their credentials and fees; and their caring never stops. It’s not advised to hire a high powered expertfor a truly vital job; not minding the impression on his credentials.
6. Never hire above two members of a household (except possibly your own) and never hire lovers or husband and wife; not minding how necessary their individual skills may be to your organization.
7. Before you hire, you will interview. Knowing what skills and performance you want from the person you will hire. Do give applicants time to think about your questions on those matters.
8. Be specific in your questioning. Generalities begat general (thus useless) responses. Require applicants to be specific in their answers. Use the questions “why” and “how” to follow up responses.
9. As for the interview strategy itself, seat applicants beside you if possible; rather than across the desk from you, in order for you to better gauge his reactions. Pick up his/her resume, frowning every now and then as if pondering on something.

When this bit of play acting is finished; and the applicant suitably is unsettled by it, begin by asking the applicant why he wants the vacant job and why he feels qualified to do it. Let him sell himself as much as he wants to; interrupting only with specific questions. Finally, if the applicant is presently working, ask him why he wants to change jobs.

10. If the applicant should frown, squirm or stroke his cheek with apparent concern while you are outlining the job difficulties; you should begin kissing him off. In polite language, let your feelings be known to the applicant. Unless the applicant tries to sell himself back into contention, do kiss him off. Tell him you have others to interview and you will let him know, one way or the other in a day or two.
11. Also kiss off any applicant who is full of questions about his career’s future with you.
12. In any case, close interviews when you have found out all you need to know; whether this takes five minutes or fifty.
13. When an applicant seems worth another look, check out his business references and employment history. Forget about personal references; he’s not going to list someone who will bum rap him. If you happen to know one or more of his personal refs, a call or two may get you some useful inside info.
14. Bring in the most likely candidate for a second interview, preferably at lunch and at this meeting; zap him with whatever you may have turned up bogus in his business references or employment history. If those doubts; real or imagined are resolved to your satisfaction, sell the job to the applicant.

Sell the job; make no promises of future raises, promotions or broadening of responsibilities. What the applicant gets is what he gets; nobody, not even you have the crystal ball that works. Let him do the job applied for and we’ll see what happens.

16. Following your selling of the job, pose a few hypothetical problems the applicant may encounter on the job and ask him how he might go about meeting them. If the applicant passes muster; make an offer and hire him. If not, back to the office to schedule a second interview with the next most likely candidate.

And lastly, never you hire someone of the opposite sex in hopes of future erotic reward. It might be the beginning of the end for your business.

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