Everyone knows how to hire the right people when they have months to complete the recruitment.
But what if you have just a week? Or 48 hours?
That’s when things get really complicated.
Hiring the right person for the job comes down to nailing skills, personality, and availability.
To hire the right people consistently, you need a system that works every time, for a variety of projects.
Let’s find you how to hire the right person even when clients have above-average expectations from your high-performing team.
Listen to the Virtual Frontier Podcast.
How to Hire the Right People for Virtual Teams
High performers are rare. But high performers with a knack to collaborate well and are free to do a project are few and far between. Here is how to adopt a confident mindset and the knowledge to hire the right people.
1. Identify the gap.
Usually, any talent shortage comes down to missing skills. Even missing staff hours can be classified as skills: for example, you need another person with the same skills because a project has grown. You need to be precise about what you are looking for — be it leadership skills, technical skills, or project management skills. You need to be thorough in what is needed for a particular project in terms of the level of expertise, project hours, and soft skills. Then the right person will find you.
Don’t know how to define expert skills? Here is a recruitment process that can help you get the technical expertise for a project from the hiring pool:
The Perfect Freelancer Experience Strategy – Q&A E 7 #AskTheCEO
2. Create unique job descriptions.
Hiring the right person goes in a similar way as you define your perfect client or your ideal customer. Your unique business offer, your ideal customer persona template, and your best job candidate description should have one crucial thing in common: they must have a unique value. Otherwise, you are competing in an overcrowded market, juggling a hit-and-miss recruitment process.
A great job description will serve you as an onboarding guide for the new employee, which means you spend less time on introducing the new team member to how things in your company work.
Be precise with the skills. Bit don’t forget to dedicate a paragraph to the company culture. A person that does not fit in the culture may underperform due to a lack of motivation.
Learn more about efficient employee onboarding for long-term projects.
3. Define the level of job autonomy and responsibility.
The new person needs to understand your company’s structure.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is required from the candidate’s role?
- Where is the role positioned in their new team?
- Who are the colleagues and what will make the job glide smoothly from day one?
- How will the team communicate?
Explain the autonomy and the job responsibility the hiree will have: high performers are usually self-motivated. Do all you can to not destroy their motivation once you have them on board. Moreover, you may have problems with hiring the right people because you are stuck with your company structure in the past.
5 Steps To A Modern Company Structure – E 20 – #AskTheCEO
4. Reduce mismatch errors.
Once you have selected the potential candidate/s, the next round is to weed the “right” person from the “likely” candidates. Not a big secret, correct?
But before you jump into finding faults and capabilities in your candidate pool, it may be wise to look into your own biases. Everyone is prone to biases as they try to simplify information coming from the environment. Asking the right questions will help you hire the right people but only if you are aware of the common biases:
Stereotyping.
Think putting people in a mold, template, matrix, or model. Stereotyping harms by placing an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment on a person. You cannot always escape stereotyping. But you can become more aware of your biases are how they affect your hiring practices and frameworks.
Halo effect.
A person’s positive characteristic in one area makes you assume other positive characteristics about the same person in other areas. Avoid the halo effect by leaving enough to mentally process information. Having a hiring checklist and a second interviewer doesn’t hurt either. Do a reality check by asking team members.
First impression.
Do the following exercise: counter a good first impression you have about a person with its opposite. You are more likely to reach a balanced and realistic opinion.
Projection.
Projection bias arises from placing (or rather misplacing) one’s own opinions, feelings, and beliefs on other people. Since projection is essentially emotional, it is hard to avoid it. But ensuring you don’t make any rash hiring decisions by creating rules about how to hire the best people will certainly help.
Contrast.
When you assess two things in comparison to each other instead of individually, you are prone to cognitive bias. For example, you can evaluate the performance of one team member against another, instead of focusing on their achievements compared to a previous period.
5. Hire the right person, not the best person.
Ensuring you have chosen an exceptional candidate, you need to pay attention to the growth of the position. Hiring capable, talented people is the future of the workforce. So if you are looking to expand your business, it is important to take your hiring resources as your most important asset.
The best person for a specific job may not be the right person for the company in the long term. Choose wisely.
You’d be surprised to hear how often a freelancer is the best and the right person for the job.
If you want to know how to hire the right people for your freelance team, get your help below.
