4 Tips on Hiring New Team Members

Businesses, startups especially, always have a hard time sourcing quality candidates for new jobs, even if they have big budgets for a Human Resources team or outside recruiters who can scrape around and find leads.

But for startups and small businesses looking to hire for new positions in order to operate at optimal speed, hiring new team members that work out in the long-run can be one of the more difficult challenges.

There’’s nothing more inefficient than hiring a new person, on-boarding them (“showing them the ropes”), reviewing their input a month later, then realizing it’s not working out. You lose time and money, both of which are on short-supply for all startups. So, here are a few tips that startups should keep in mind to ensure they’’re hiring the right candidates for their jobs the first time around.

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Ask Questions That Matter

One of the more important questions to ask any candidate applying for a job is what value they can add and what plans they have for the role they will fill. Businesses can’’t grow without action, and while ideas are always welcome, especially for businesses looking to differentiate themselves and increase their value to their consumer, the best ideas are rarely implemented due to lack of skill and resources.

If your candidate is able to come up with actionable plans and independently execute them, then they are very likely to provide the value that you are looking for. You should also ask them circumstantial questions, giving them different scenarios and asking how they might resolve an issue. This will allow you to see how their minds work, and also evaluate their fit in your startup’s culture.

Let Them Work Remotely

While it wouldn’’t make sense to let your new employee in Queens work at home when your office is in Brooklyn or Manhattan, it makes a ton of sense not to limit your candidate pool by putting geographical restrictions on who can apply. Since local businesses with bigger hiring budgets are snatching up all the high-quality workers, someone out in Kansas City may have the personality and skills you are looking for and may be struggling in a difficult job market in their area. The fact is, working remotely with an exceptional candidate is far better than working in the same office with a mediocre one.

Put ‘’Em to the Test

To optimize your time, and ensure you’’re properly vetting all of your candidates . Rather than having to choose between all of them at once, you can easily implement test runs with multiple candidates to see who can actually walk the walk. You can do a two-week or even one month trial period with a few candidates and see if they survive the way your business operates.

Many candidates look good on paper, but never make it past the on-boarding process. Other candidates may never be able to provide the output you were expecting because their MBA never gave them the real-world experience they needed to actually create value.

Never Hire Out of Desperation

While it’’s tempting to hire quickly when you’’re desperate to fill a new opening, you should only hire if the candidate is worth hiring. It’s an awful thing for a small business to hire out of desperation because you frequently wind end up hiring someone who may work well as a temporary fix, but all the time and investment you spend will have gone to waste once when they don’t work out.

If you hire only when you find the exceptional candidate that can assuredly get the job done, and are able to scale with you, then you will be very efficient and successful in bringing on new team members who contribute to the business.

What things have worked for your startup in hiring new team members?

Photo by moesizlak7

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