Finding Five Star Employees

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For the last three weeks, I have been working alongside two team members as we revamp our hiring process. This All In Intensive is being led by The All In Company. Danielle Mulvey is the founder of the company and she is a fellow Profit First Professional Mastery Member. This company is taking the principles in Mike Michalowicz' future book, tentatively titled All In, and putting them into practice. The exercises that we are doing daily are designed to help us recruit and hire employees that are in alignment with our business. 

One of the early exercises was to have all of our employees take an assessment that helped us understand how our current employees like to work. For example, do they prefer to work with numbers or people or spatial challenges. The assessments will be used to create a benchmark that we will compare future job candidates against. I love this data driven approach to understand what makes our team tick and how we can replicate those past great hires in the future. As I told my team, it’s the best we can do since cloning isn't an option.

Another exercise has been developing job posts for our current job roles. This is so much more now that we have all the wonderful platforms like Indeed, Zip Recruiter, LinkedIn, etc. Gone are the days of the 1 - 2-inch ads in the classified sections. The platforms and online access by candidates allow us to really get to know each other.

Our process calls for assessments that are evaluated to determine which candidates we will interview. This allows us to only spend time with those potential five-star employees and not waste time or be tempted by someone that is a 1-star but can pull off a great interview. Since we are able to spend more time with qualified candidates, we are able to better determine if we are a good fit. We give them homework to complete that gives us insight into their analysis skills and their communication skills. We observe them navigating an excel document during a call to ensure they know their way around a spreadsheet. We conduct multiple interviews and also ask a candidate to participate in a paid shadow day. This is a lot more work than what we have done in the past. We want to have multiple opportunities to assess a candidate. These opportunities give us a greater chance of making a great hire that will fit in our culture and be a long-term employee. It's an upfront investment that will pay off for years to come.

You may be wondering what defines a five-star employee. The beauty of this program is that you get to decide. I'm doing this program with another Profit First Professional Mastery Member firm. I can tell you our benchmark and criteria are totally different. Our cultures are very different. We are 100% remote and they prefer to have everyone in the office. We both are hiring for people that are striving for excellence, but the questions they ask in the interviews reflect how that looks in their firm and we are inquiring based on how it shines in our firm. Perhaps our five-star employees would only be a three-star fit for them. 

I really love this approach as it combines data about what works now with our existing team with data from a candidate. It also gives us multiple opportunities to interact and get to know the candidate. And the really beautiful thing is that when someone isn't a good fit for us, we know that they will be for someone else. No more guilt that I can't hire everyone. If hiring has been a challenge and you'd like help to implement a system, let me know. I'm happy to answer your questions and put you in touch with Danielle.

About the author 

Cyndi Thomason

Cyndi is a mom and author of Profit First for Ecommerce Sellers and Motherhood, Apple Pie, and all that Happy Horseshit. She is also a speaker and thought leader in areas of ecommerce accounting and Mom Entrepreneurship. Cyndi is the founder of bookskeep which provides accounting and Profit First advisory services to hundreds of ecommerce businesses around the world. When not helping business owners or her team, Cyndi can be found in her garden.

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