The Hiring Formula for Early Growth

The Hiring Formula for Early Growth

- Lessons Learned, Episode 30

In earlier episodes, I talked about my first and second attempts to hire employees (See Episodes 21 and 25 here). 

So, I'd gradually converted some part-time employees into full-timers. And as we added more clients and started doing more regular scheduled maintenance, we needed to develop ongoing processes for hiring. When you're super-small I don't believe that you should always be hiring (or pretend to be hiring). 

But you should have a process that works, and that gets better each time it's used.

Two important factors drove the development of my hiring. First, I wanted people who would learn *MY* processes and procedures. Second, I wanted people who were not mentally or physically lazy. In other words, they needed to be ready, willing, and able to work.

Focusing on those two things allowed us to avoid people who had no attention to detail, worked to avoid work, were burned out on the industry, and wanted to be overpaid for doing less than everyone else. Sadly, the job market in IT tends to attract (or create) people with very bad habits.

Here are two tactics that worked really well to find the right employees (both technicians and administrative assistants): Internships and local Craigslist ads.

Internships

Our foray into internships started with the local community college and move to local tech schools. For a while, I was on the advisory board for a local tech school. So that gave me easy access to internship postings.

We always paid for internships. It wasn't a lot. By today's standard, we would probably pay $20/hour. That gives a college student or tech student some spending money and helps build some loyalty. We always found good people. 

One person who stands out is a web developer who eventually helped us sell about $500,000 in programming over three years. Of course, he moved from intern to fulltime and much better paid in that time. He was also a great guy, easy to get along with, and very good. We would not have found him if we just put an ad out.

Another stand-out is a design student who created several graphics for us. She designed some posters I had made for our office. And she designed a book cover that won a design away. Although the award went to my book company, I gave her the plaque to take home because her name was right there on the cover as the designer.

Internships allow us to tap into young talent. In my brain, young people have more new ideas and less burnout. And, in many cases, they have access to and experience in some newer technology. Best of all, they are willing to learn. If I have to choose between someone who graduated sixth grad and swore to never read a book again, and someone who went to a tech school to learn career skills, I'll take the tech student every time.

To get interns, we wrote up a simple job spec and posted it with local tech schools and community colleges. They all have job centers. And they all take offers like this via email or a web site. Some of them are working on a formal internship from the school, but most don't care about that and are just willing to take an entry-level job so they can build their resume and skills.

In the "buy vs. build" world of IT support, I'd rather build a consultant that does things our way than to buy one with bad habits who has to be un-trained and re-trained.

Craigslist

I've blogged a lot about our success with CL ads. Search for "Craigslist" on this blog. Or just start with this one and follow the links: https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2017/08/hiring-good-administrative-assistant.html

One of the biggest problems with a very small company looking to hire someone is the overwhelm of the job search process. If you put out an ad, you'll likely get hundreds of responses, MOST of which are irrelevant. Job counselors give horrible advice, like, "Apply everywhere to any job that might just be related."

This results in applicants that are completely unqualified, or don't even want this job. They just hope someone, somewhere talks to them. And then, I guess, that person will know someone who actually needs them.

I have to admit, I don't actually understand why they do it. But I got resumes from SQL programmers for entry level IT infrastructure jobs. And people demanding $75,000 (ten years ago) for a level 1 tech position. And thousands of other examples.

So we settled on a process that allows people to filter themselves. Our ad says DO NOT send a resume or your email will be deleted. Instead, write one paragraph telling me why I should ask for your resume. You would be amazed at how quickly people eliminate themselves. The tiniest bit of effort will remove 100 people from a potential of 125 applicants.

Next, we required that they have at least one Microsoft certification. I don't care what it was. But we wanted to see their MS transcript and verify that it was legit. You can argue all day about certifications being irrelevant. But there is a difference between people who can pass one of those exams and one who can't. 

We also had a long hiring process, but that's another story for another day.

In general, our internships and Craigslist self-screening process did a great job of helping us find a really good mix of people and build an awesome team. And even today, when I hire about one person every two years, I do the exact same thing.

Feedback Welcome.

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All comments welcome.

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Episode 30 

This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. 

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