The Engaged Hiring Process: A Simple Plan to Help You Hire the Best

By Zane Safrit

Can you afford the average cost of a bad hiring decision? That costs companies anywhere from three to five times the annual salary of the wrong person they hired.

In this short book I share the methods and resources I used to make four very good hiring decisions and that built a culture of engagement or further strengthened it among our employees. This is the culture each new A-Player we hired joined. That is is vital to the success of your hiring decisions as the person or their background of strengths and skills and references.

I applied this approach here in the U.S. and overseas. The results of these hiring decisions led us to these achievements:

* sales doubled and new orders tripled in the first 6 months of a new subsidiary;
* revenue growth of 80% while industry prices plummeted by 70% for new and existing customers;
* sales conversion rates grew from 50% to over 80%;
* positive cash-flows grew.

There are no shortcuts to making the right hiring decision. It takes everyone's full commitment, requiring an investment of your time and attention to map a plan, describe the goal, execute it and move quickly to the next challenge.

My simple plan helps you avoid common mistakes found in most hiring decisions while it helps you engage your key stakeholders in its planning, preparation and execution. This is key. The culture your new A-Player is welcome into plays an important role in their success, your team's success, and yours. My plan shows you how to create a culture of engagement that welcomes your new employee with welcome arms and a plan for their immediate success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483534596

Book preview

Epilogue

Introduction

Our employees are our greatest asset. You see this cliche’ or its offspring splattered across corporate websites, intranets and employee manuals.

However, unlike most cliche’s this one carries more than just ‘some’ truth. Employees are a company’s greatest asset. Without employees a company has no other asset. Every company’s success depends entirely on this greatest asset and its performance. Period. Full stop.

That ROA, Return on Assets, among publicly traded companies has dropped by 75% since 1965 and 70% of U.S. employees remain disengaged with their work means Our employees are a greatest asset remains an empty slogan for too many companies.

This book can help you create an engaging, efficient hiring process, one that is made cash-flow friendly by engaging your in-house experts, those greatest assets, at each stage from preparing the job description to recruiting the candidates to interviewing and moving the spoon that stirs this drink: the on-boarding process.

By following this process, engaging your employees in the hiring process, you honor that Truth - Employees are our greatest asset - in a way that is meaningful to your employees.

That all sounds nice, classroom nice.

However, the reality is nicer. As CEO of a small company, we used this engaged hiring process to make four excellent hiring decisions, hiring three great people and encouraging one great person to find another culture, better-suited for their strengths. So, nice works in an applied, real-world it-really-does-work way.

There is more. In the process we learned about each other, our strengths, our commitment to each other and our abilities to craft a meaningful solution to our most pressing need: another A-Player right now. This process of learning together, making decisions together, created a culture of learners, leaders and owners. We created our company so we felt great pride in saying That’s my company. That’s where I work.

Our employees owned their hiring process and the results of their process which inspired them to create an effective, efficient on-boarding program for the new hire. This helped sustain the new hire’s enthusiasm, facilitating an easier and faster integration into our company’s operations. In plain language, the new employees were able, empowered, to make positive contributions, fly solo if you will, sooner than our other hires where this process was not used.

As we grew, we revisited our engaged hiring process repeatedly to insure the most efficient engagement with each employee. Their investment in refining their hiring process offered them owner’s equity, with the resulting boost in pride, passion and authority within the company. And, as ‘owners’ they reaped financial rewards, too.

Their commitment to achieving the best outcomes also grew. They welcomed each new hire with open arms, embracing their extra work from on-boarding the new and enabling the new hire to make positive contributions sooner.

Likewise, each new hire rewarded our investment in their success with an investment of their own,