Dr. Sabrina Starling | The How to Hire the Best System™: The Small Business Owner’s Ultimate System

Step 1: Understand yourself and your core values.

• Your core values are the seeds of the culture that you’re creating in your business.

• Use your core values to guide your recruiting and hiring process to attract people who are a better fit with your core values.

• Your core values are your way and rules of living.

• After extracting and defining your core values, make them as immutable laws.
  • If someone violates your core values, they are not going to be welcome to stay in your business anymore unless they’re willing to correct themselves from violating.

• These immutable laws will also attract people who have the same core values. It creates harmony and lessens conflicts from the get-go.

• There are two ways to identify your core values:
  • Pay attention when you’re upset.
    • Underneath every moment that you become upset is your core value.

• • Pay attention to when you feel most proud.
    • This includes your business and even your personal life.

• Avoid identifying your core values with team members – do it on your own as the founder of the business.

• Scatter the messaging of your immutable laws all over your platform like website, emails, meetings, social media.

Step 2: Think about a clearly defined role you’re hiring someone for.

• Don’t look forward to hiring someone to do everything. Be specific on one role that you’re hiring for and one clear result.

• For businesses startups, you can look at hiring part-time, independent contractors, or virtual assistants.
  • Get away from the feeling of hiring a full-time role.

• Know the most important task you need to get done that has the greatest impact.
  • Define with yourself how that task ties with the sweet spot of the business.
  • The sweet spot of your business is the intersection of your top clients, your unique strengths, and your systems that support what you’re delivering.
  • After that, tie it to the profitability of the business.
  • Figure these points out first before hiring.

• This step is the beginning of crafting a job description once you’ve identified a clear result of what you’re looking for.
  • You may also start pointing out the required skills and characteristics for the role you’re hiring for.

• This step is simply about creating your ideal employee template. Be sure to include the following foundational pieces in your ideal employee template:
  • Who are you trying to attract? What they are like?
  • What is going to make your role and your offer very enticing to your ideal employee?

• Another real key consideration to include is a description of what your culture is and what it is like to work for you.

Step 3: Spread the word everywhere.

• Be aware that the best employees who’ll stay the longest will come through referrals.
  • Referrals of your current employees.
  • Referrals from your existing clients.
  • Referrals from your vendors.

• Start with your networks through word of mouth.

• Consider social media as it is highly effective if you have a good job description.

• Establish a recruiting page or a careers page on your website.
  • Your call to action should be inviting them to learn about the job.
  • Include a short video that shows and captures your culture.
    • Feature your best team members.
    • Have them talk about why they love working for your business.
    • Show team building activities that you’ve done.

• • The next step is to invite them to fill out or submit an application.

• Make sure that something’s embedded in your job description to know who’s paying attention.
  • Embed something that they need to do when sending their application.

• Write at the beginning of the application process that you want your candidates to acknowledge upon their advance in the hiring process that they will be asked to put into contact with references of your choosing.

Step 4: Have your candidate answer a situational question that was based on your core value through a video.

• Ask questions about your immutable laws.

• Ask your current team members about the worst day on their job and use it to create a situational question for your candidate.

• This will make you see if your candidates are in alignment with your immutable laws based on their responses.

• You can also pick up body language through video.

• Be sure to pay attention to how your candidates are presenting themselves.

• Another good filter is doing group interviews.
  • Have your candidates come in for a one-hour group interview.
  • Ask some questions.
  • Start screening people.
  • Pick the top three that you see are best aligned with your immutable laws, have the personality and skills for the open role, are the right fit.

• Do a one-on-one interview with the people who made it to your qualifications based on their core values, personality and skills, and compatibility.
  • Watch closely on the body language of your interviewee.
  • Check with the consistency of their responses to different questions.
  • If it’s your first time doing an interview, bring somebody in who will assist you with watching the body language and checking with consistency.

• Don’t skip the reference check.

• Don’t delay as A players are quick to be snapped up by other employers.

• Make your offer quickly to them.