Come with me down the yellow brick road of small business job hiring.
It sounds so easy at the beginning when the road looks golden and opportunistic. Soon, we see that the road is impassable and in bad need of repair.
We are convinced that there is a magic trick to finding and hiring the right people. Just post something on Indeed! No, LinkedIn! Oh wait, maybe our local Chamber is where to hunt!
Hiring and onboarding has become a dysfunctional mess as life has gotten busier.
Let’s slow everything down and think logically through the people-challenge that you will face as a business owner.
I called a local chimney sweep this morning, and asked him when one of his crew would be able to come service our chimney. His response, “it’s just me”.
My immediate thought as a business coach was, “let’s hire someone bro!!”
Then I stopped my own emotional response.
It is really hard to find and motivate great people to do great work, especially hard work.
Lead Well.
If you’re looking for more resources to work ON your business, we have them.
When hiring you’ve got to consider and articulate the exact job role, the individual tasks of that role, the expectations, the tasks you keep versus the tasks that you delegate, and on and on.
It’s complex and requires real thought and real work.
When we hired our first full-time business coach, it took us about 8 months to go through the entire hiring process.
But there is one thing that goes overlooked regularly in the hiring process…personality fit.
Over the past five or six years, we have facilitated almost 1,000 DISC personality profile assessments.
The trends are obvious and extraordinary.
If someone is not a personality fit for a role, it takes about three to six months before the misalignment rears its ugly head and both the owner and the new hire feel uncomfortable and irritable.
Then the accusations start flying:
“They are horrible at their role!”
“This owner has NO idea what he is doing!”
“Uggh, If I ran my house like they run their business, we’d be broke.”
“For goodness sakes, it’s just easier if I do it myself!”
This doesn’t have to happen.
There are four major personalities in this world; Driver, Influencer, Steady, and Compliant.
There are not many Driver personalities, maybe 3%, and they primarily are most comfortable owning the business and pushing for top line results.
Influencers are more prevalent but not by much. About 11% of the population have the natural disposition to go influence the rest of us to part with our money for their product.
Compliant personalities, the CPA’s, Project Managers, and Engineers, are more available than Influencers, but not by much. Around 17% of the population geek out over accuracy and numbers.
Finally, the Steady personality. The 69% of society that show up day after day and enjoy the predictable base hits of bookkeeping, data entry, customer service, and task completion, all packaged in a can’t-everybody-just-get-along culture.
If you have an Influencer trying to spend their days in front of a computer typing away at data entry, it’s a recipe for frustration.
If you’re asking a Compliant personality to be a “self-starter” then you are cooking up disappointment.
We use famous phrases like “internally-motivated”, “self-starter”, and “detail-oriented”, and then wonder why that Steady personality who loves people and relationships struggles with getting the numbers to reconcile.
If you are hiring a sales person and they don’t have some level of Influencer in their personality, then don’t get frustrated when they won’t close deals…it’s not who they are.
We have a misconception that personality profiling is the touchy-feely stuff that is extra and unnecessary. And yet it is the most objective feedback we can receive when trying to genuinely discern fitting the right person to the right role.
Certainly hold the phone interview, and the live, in person interviews, you need those critical data points. Equally critical is answering the questions, “what gives this person energy?” and “who is this person under pressure and stress?”
When you can begin to see into the person, rather than just what your eyeballs or a résumé tells you, then you can really begin to fit the right person into the right role at the right time on the right bus headed to the right destination.
The DISC personality profile helps you do that.
Scott Beebe is the founder of Business On Purpose, author of Let Your Business Burn: Stop Putting Out Fires, Discover Purpose, And Build A Business That Matters. Scott also hosts The Business On Purpose Podcast and can be found at mybusinessonpurpose.com.
