Hire Slow and Fire Fast – The Key Principles to Find Your Next Superstar

With the newly coined term, The Great Resignation, financial advisors find it increasingly more difficult to find adequate help with their business. Whether it’s hiring the best assistant or knowing that your current staff isn’t quite hitting the bar you need them to, you have to know what to look for and what to avoid. In fact, it’s crucial for the growth of your business.

The key difference between a superstar and an average employee is the combination of technical and soft skills. Finding the right fit with your culture is just as important as the experience in a candidate’s resume. 86% of executives blamed poor collaboration as the leading cause of business failure. To avoid this, we’ve created a list of fundamental principles to keep at the forefront of decision-making moments when hiring your next superstar.

Hire Slow and Fire Fast

Eban Pagan, an entrepreneur teacher and technology investor, just as many others before him, said it best – “hire slowly, fire quickly.” Many advisors who are drowning in paperwork and administrative tasks may be eager to hire someone “just to fill the spot.” But do you know how much that actually costs you?

Not only is your valuable time wasted from teaching this new hire how to succeed in their role, but also their compensation, severance, and any disruption costs are not worth the temporary fulfillment. Your guiding standard should be “when in doubt, don’t hire.”

Here are several helpful hints for asking the right questions that will assist you in the search for your next superstar.

Team and Cultural Fit

Knowing your team’s communication styles and how it fits with the day-to-day work and overall vision is crucial to a cohesive system that moves together. Before hiring, get to know your candidates by having them fill out a DISC assessment. DISC stands for:

Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. It measures their directness, social characteristics, accommodating nature, and analytical styles.

For your hire to be a superstar and not just someone to fill the role requirements, they must be aligned with your values, mission, and behaviors. Keep in mind, what they value is what they will model throughout the office and in their interactions. You’ll want to base your questions around:

• How they handle conflict.
• Their follow-up habits.
• Their flexibility.
• Their ideal working environment.

Skills and Traits

Hiring someone solely for their technical skills to fill the role can be a dire mistake. You want someone well-rounded in the position that can communicate effectively. Beyond their aptitude, a superstar employee will be a strategic thinker and quick learner. They have their own desire to be successful and are passionate about their goals and, in turn, your business’s goals. Beyond asking a candidate about their experience, find out:

• What unique qualifications do they possess that separate them from other candidates?
• What do they like to learn in their free time?
• How do they begin the planning and organization process?

What You Should Know

To hire an absolute superstar, you need to know a lot about them first. Take the time to ask thought-provoking questions and have several interview tiers, so you aren’t wasting time with profound questions on a large pool of candidates that don’t have the competencies you require. You should base your interview around:

• Their career path. Where they want to be in 1,3, 5 and 10 years.
• Their motivation for this type of role and with your business specifically. Why are they interested in this one particular?
• How would they describe their dream boss?
• How would they describe a successful candidate in this role?
• What are they looking for in a job?

Leading Advisor can help you hire by guiding you through a lengthy hiring system that we’ve perfected to help uncover the perfect hires in a pool of wishy-washy candidates.

How to Measure the Success of Your New Hire

According to the fifth employee of Amazon, he described Jeff Bezos’s hiring system as strict, only accepting the best of the best. “One of his mottos was that each time we hired someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire.”

So how do you measure their success without creating a toxic environment as a hovering boss? One of the strategies is to ask for a daily update in the first 30 days. Explain to the new hire that you’ll be working closely together, and at the end of every day, you’d like them to take only 5 minutes to craft an email that answers the following:

1. What did you do today, and what were the results of those actions?
2. Did you face any problems/obstacles?
3. Do you have any questions for me?

After 30 days,  you can evaluate where that employee is. Someone you believe isn’t living up to the role’s expectations, and you’ve noticed only sending out two daily reports per week might be a quick-fire scenario to find the right fit. However, just because someone doesn’t hand in their daily report every day doesn’t mean they should be fired. Someone may be a high-performer that values performance over processes. It’ll be up to you if this fits with your team culture and if they’ll be successful in their role.

The bottom line of a business is not its financial growth, even in the finance industry – it’s the people whose energy, efforts, and attitude make the company what it is.

If you need help finding your next superstar, click on the button below to schedule a FREE 30 minutes discovery call with Laura Reilly.