Evolving Business Minds

Key Steps for Effective Hiring with Andy Silvius | #131

• Andy Silvius • Episode 131

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In this video, Andy Silvius shares key steps for effective hiring in order to scale your business and keep clients happy. Learn how communication plays a crucial role in successful client retention.

What if your next hire could be the game-changer your business needs? In this episode of Evolving Business Minds, we dive deep into the treacherous waters of hiring and share our hard-earned lessons from running a bookkeeping firm. With candid stories of hiring mistakes and the chaos of onboarding the wrong people, we’ll show you the importance of a structured, repeatable hiring process that could save your business from costly errors.

Unlock a treasure trove of insights as we introduce a four-step talent acquisition process that has transformed our approach to hiring. From attracting a high volume of qualified candidates to conducting meticulous interviews and making well-informed decisions, we emphasize the critical importance of patience and precision. Learn how to sort and nurture applicants efficiently, ensuring you only invest time in those who truly fit your team’s needs and culture.

Get ready to refine your hiring strategies with practical tips on outlining job responsibilities, crafting comprehensive job ads, and leveraging tools like Google Forms for better communication. We’ll guide you through the stages of sorting applications and conducting effective interviews, streamlining your process to build a robust team. Don’t miss our strategic advice on optimizing your hiring workflow and our invitation to share your thoughts on this new episode format. Your feedback could shape future content as we continue to explore the intricacies of business growth.

Episode Sponsored by: Olive Branch Bookkeeping, Inc

Message from our sponsor: A profitable business needs a tailored financial solution for growth. Understanding your needs and what matters most to you is our #1 priority. We have put together a bookkeeping service that will allow you to take control of your business and future growth.

📲 Schedule a discovery call with Olive Branch Bookkeeping, Inc here: https://calendly.com/caryn-23/discover_conversation

Evolving Business Minds podcast links:

Listen on Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/evolving-business-minds/id1498316242

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0Qqiizmt3UzcbQM9EJFViw?si=cJSjUhPMTSqS5tH0z7SkUg

Links to connect with Andy Silvius:

Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andysilvius/

Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ResourcefulAgent/

Follow on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewsilvius/

Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andysilvius?lang=en

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Andy Silvius:

All right, welcome to a new episode of the Evolving Business Minds podcast. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different than usual. So typically, if you're new to the show, what I usually do is interview business owners and discuss everything that they've done how they started their companies and how they've grown and dealt with challenges that they faced. But today I decided I wanted to start implementing some of these. That are just solo episodes, so I'm just going to discuss some of the issues that I've come through or come across in my business and how I've resolved them, some of the issues that I've come through or come across in my business and how I've resolved them, and hopefully it'll give you guys a little bit more value Not to say that the episodes with the guests don't give you value, but I think we don't really dive into specific topics, and so there's a couple of these things that I have struggled with in my business and had to implement and iterate over time, and so I think it'd be great to be able to share that with you guys. So in this episode I'm going to discuss my process for hiring new team members within our business. I'm going to share some of the big mistakes that I've made along the way and why my process has evolved over time. And the reason I want to do an episode around hiring team members is I think a lot of business owners really, really struggle with understanding leverage in their business, understanding how to hire and what to do. So one of the questions that I wrote down just to talk about is like have you ever, have you ever been quick to hire people in your business and then, within 30, 60 days, or sometimes way sooner, you realize that they're just not a fit and they're not going to be, they're not going to fit in with your team, they're not going to be the person you thought they were when you're hiring them. Well, that is exactly the position that I have been in many times. So you know, based on a lot of conversations I've had with other business owners, this is also pretty common occurrence for them and obviously, like I said, it's been something that we've struggled with our business, where we hire somebody and maybe we didn't take enough time to interview or find enough candidates, and so what happens is you get these people in your business that aren't qualified for the job they don't end up working out and typically it takes longer to get them out of your business than it did to get them in, and then it costs you a lot more money. This is typically what I found. This is typically a by-product of just not having a repeatable, systemized process for hiring talent or hiring new team members in your business.

Andy Silvius:

So I want to go over our story a little bit. Um, so I want to go over our story a little bit. Uh, we have a bookkeeping firm, and so if you're, if you followed me for any period of time, I'm from was mechanic years ago, worked in hydraulics and heavy equipment and more recently had worked for cat by cat dealership, and then I got into real estate and grew, um, grew my real estate business and grew a team there. And then I got into real estate and grew, grew my real estate business and grew a team there. And then we, we moved, we started a bookkeeping firm a couple of years back. My wife's had 17 year plus years of experience with it and it started growing pretty quickly. So we needed to start hiring new team members to be able to leverage her time, because she just couldn't keep up with all of it, and so I'm going to tell a story about three hires. That. So the first one was hired on very rapidly and they were hired on very rapidly.

Andy Silvius:

We didn't really have a process in place, and so this happened for the next two people as well, where we just interviewed. Maybe we put a job posting out, but maybe we interviewed one or two people and then we would just hire one and we didn't have a great process for it. So it was just, you know, basic questions. Look at the resume. Assume that they're telling the truth about their experience level and where they're going to be at and the way my wife and I operate in businesses. It's very easy for us I shouldn't say easy. We have the personality types that if somebody gets in, even if they're struggling, we're going to blame ourselves. So it's going to be hey, we need to provide them more training and do all these things.

Andy Silvius:

Well, what happens is, over the long period of time, it just if they're not qualified for the job, you can provide all the training you can, but it doesn't mean that they're going to still be a fit in your business. And now you've spent time and money and effort into building this platform, building the training for somebody who's not wasn't qualified in the first place. So back to the story. We'd hire people and we would know within two weeks, three weeks, that hey, like there's all these mistakes happening, there's all these things going on. They don't really know the systems that we use as well as they said that they did. And so it just became this huge challenge, and so it kept happening over and over. And the problem was we were trying to solve a pain in our business, and that pain being, you know, overwhelm, lack of time to get the job done to fulfill the service we were providing. And so and I think a lot of business owners go through this where you just you want to feel the pain so quickly that you just hire the first convenient person that comes in or is in front of you.

Andy Silvius:

Hey, everyone, I have a quick interruption from the show, but I'll make it brief. I've got something that I think is vital for every entrepreneur out there and it can be a game changer for your business. Navigating the business world demands more than just passion. It requires crystal clear financial insight. That's where our company, olive Branch Bookkeeping Inc. Comes in, offering not just book cleanups for those behind on taxes, but also comprehensive monthly bookkeeping, payroll management, corporate structuring and the key to informed decisions, detailed profit and loss reports. Imagine this your financial records, spotless and strategic, paving the way for growth without the headache of entangling years of bookkeeping yourself. With Olive Branch, you're equipped with financial clarity to steer your business forward. So if the thought of sorting out your finances feels overwhelming, let Olive Branch Bookkeeping lighten the load. They're more than just bookkeepers, they're your financial clarity partners. If you'd like to see how our team can help you and your business, I'll include a booking link and contact information in the show notes so you can schedule a free discovery call. And so you know, I think we all, whoever.

Andy Silvius:

If you're a business owner and you've tried hiring people or you've hired people in the past, you know I'm sure there's at one point been. You know you wondering why you're having all these bad experiences with the people you hire. And really what it boils down to is there's no process in place, there's no system and you're just not interviewing enough people to know who's. No process in place, there's no system and you're just not interviewing enough people to know who's qualified for the job. You don't know what good is yet until you have had the discussion with a lot of people and you have a solid process that's repeatable, to make sure that you're interviewing enough candidates to bring in a qualified person in the job. And there's a lot of other factors too. It's not just interviewing a lot of people. You need to be able to show them the value you're going to bring to the table as well, and there's a lot of pieces, so we'll dive in, we'll dive into all that through this episode.

Andy Silvius:

I read this quote, though, and I'm sure most of you guys have heard it, but Albert Einstein once said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Einstein once said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And so this is exactly what we had been doing the same thing over and over and expecting it to yield us different results or outcomes, and it just wasn't the case. So and after, we had gone through this process three times, and you would have thought that we would have figured it out after the first and definitely after the second time, but no, we did it three times, and this is when I really decided that, hey, we've got to sit down, we've got to build a process and have something that's repeatable for hiring talent in our business and we really need to have a lot more candidates that we're interviewing, and so it needed to change from interviewing one to two people to interviewing many, and that means that we needed to be able to generate more applications, more interest in the job position.

Andy Silvius:

Just so that you have, think about it in this way, it's kind of like sales right, like you're going to have, you know, let's just say, your, your close rate's 50 on the sales. Uh, you know, on incoming sales, well, you, you're not going to close 100, so you need to have a volume of leads coming into your system so that you can still get business and continue to grow. Well, it's similar with hiring people. You can't interview one to two people and pick a qualified candidate out of those one or two. You need to have many. And so what I ended up building was this four-step, what I just call my talent acquisition outline, and so it consists of four areas, and that's the first one's generating applications. So this is going to be, you know, posting the job, getting the attention on the role that you're trying to hire for.

Andy Silvius:

The second thing is going to be sorting and your nurture of the applicants. So, once you have a list of candidates for the position, people who are applying for the job. You need to be able to sort through those and understand who is actually going to be a good fit to interview, because if you just start interviewing everyone, you're going to waste a lot of time. There's a lot of people who just put their hat in the ring, you know, they just put well, whatever the saying is, they just put their name out there and they may not have any experience with the job, they may not be qualified, and so you want to verify this before you waste all your time interviewing at least I did, and so and then the third process is going to be.

Andy Silvius:

It's going to be the interview process, and I can dive into a little bit more depth around that, but basically what it's going to be is you generate the applications step one, so job posting you're going to sort through those applications and make sure that whoever you're talking with or, I'm sorry, you're going to sort through those applications and make sure who you're going to move to the next stage, which is the interview process that they're qualified, at least based on the paper and the questions you've asked. And then, finally, you're going to have the hiring stage, and so I don't want to I can't take full credit for this. It's definitely this process is a combination of mentors and their processes and then a mixture of, like me, trying to eliminate some of the mistakes I've made in the past and so understanding that we just truly weren't interviewing enough people, and then trying to piece together, you know, stuff from online and content, things that I felt like it would work in our business. And so, um, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of us place the first convenient person into the position we're trying to fill, even if you have no idea whether they're qualified or not, because we have some pain or we have some pain in our business that we're trying to relieve quickly. And so, while it takes time to go through this, it takes time to put the job ad together, post the job, then you've got to sort through however many applicants come through for the job, and then you got to interview them and we do a two-step interview process, and so, again, I'm giving you guys kind of the over high level overview, but we'll dive in a little deep. So we have a two-step interview process and then the hiring stage, but the so it does take time, if, of course it takes time to review all these things, but it's going to take you. It's going to cost you more time and more money if you were to hire quickly and then fire slow, and really we should be reversing that and taking our time and finding the right people to put into our business. And if you've gone through all the steps, your turnover rate on employees should reduce. There's a lot of factors in there, too, about your management style and how you lead your team, but if we're just strictly looking at the amount of people coming in and the options we have, if you take your time up front, it should save you a lot of money on the back end, and so some of the things that we do. So I'll dive into a little bit of it here, like generating more applications.

Andy Silvius:

So the very first thing is we build the job ad. So we create a job ad that's going to consist of you know it's going to have a brief mention of our company and what our values are, what we stand for and what we do, and then the type of position we are hiring for, and then the type of position we are hiring for, and so one piece of this that's crucial is that when you're hiring the position you're going to hire for, you need to have your names, what's the word? Your position needs to be very clear to the audience you're trying to get to apply for the job. So if we're hiring for a data entry position, we're not going to put customer success manager right, like I know. That sounds obvious, but you need to determine what the names are for these positions and what those positions entail. And so we mentioned our company, we mentioned the values and the position that we're looking to fill.

Andy Silvius:

We cover some of the key responsibilities in that job, and so what we've realized is that it's easy to hire someone, or think you need someone in your business to hire, but you really need to understand what are the key responsibilities, like what is every task, what are the things that are taken off your plate. Understanding that before you even go through this process, is going to make things a lot easier for you, and so we mentioned those in the job ad, and then, in another section, we're going to mention what qualifications we are looking for in a candidate. And so you know, for our business and bookkeeping and accounting, it's like they need to understand, they need to have a certain amount of time, of experience with the software. They need to understand all the ins and outs, and so we mentioned the qualifications that we are going to look for as we review their resume and the questions. We also let them know what we offer as far as our work environment, our growth opportunities, and we do mention vaguely, like what the compensation plan would be, and so you can do this however you want. I'm just sharing with you guys like what we've done in our business, and so the final part of our ad mentions our application and selection process, and so now that we're not just interviewing one person and hiring, you know we have this whole thing from generating, sorting, interviewing. We're going to let them know the stages, from the point that they apply for the job to the point that they get on a call with us and get accepted or not, or don't get an interview. We're going to let them know in that job ad what our process is.

Andy Silvius:

I think this is an important step that a lot of people skip over. It's often overlooked, and the reason I think it's important is that people want to know, they want to, they want to know what to expect next. So if you were to apply for a job and you send your application in. This is all done online and then you never get a call back. You never get an email. You, you really don't know where you stand Like. You're just kind of always wondering. So then maybe you call them and reach out, and so that creates stress for the applicant and it also creates stress for the business owner, because now you're going to get these a lot of emails in. You'd be asking you what's going on.

Andy Silvius:

But if you just outline and give them the expectations upfront of what that process looks like and what they should expect from you as far as communication and how long, I think it makes the process a lot easier for the applicant who and keep in mind we might be interviewing team members. You know talent for our team, but you still have to sell them on why they should work with you. Just because you have a business and you post a job ad doesn't mean that you're the people coming into that role or applying for that role. You still have to show them why you're valuable to work for, and so that's a piece of it, right? We want to make sure that the process for them goes smoothly and they understand what's happening. And then so some of the other things we do, that I feel like it's a little different than what I've seen online. So you can use programs like um or websites like zip recruiter, uh, monstercom indeed. Or if you're hiring out of this, like out of the country, which we have many times, so we use other platforms to hire virtual assistants.

Andy Silvius:

Um, a lot of times you see business owners just post the job ad and then they receive, you know, the application or whatever, and their resume. Well, what we do is we actually went through and created a series of questions, and those questions are within a Google form, and that Google form obviously links to a Google sheet, and so we ask questions that are going to help us identify the skill level of the applicant and their problem solving abilities. We want to make sure A are their skill levels what we're looking for? Can they solve problems? And so some of these are just basic questions for us, based on our industry. We also design some of our questions because we want to get a glimpse on whether they're good, cultural fit or not. You might find somebody who has all the qualifications in the world, but if they don't understand the work environment that they're walking into, or maybe they're just their standards are different than ours and they don't have the same, the same cultural ideologies or fit. Then you know that's going to that's going to cause more problems down the road. So, uh, we asked him those questions to kind of get a glimpse of that. Now we also receive their resume, so we asked them for the resume as well.

Andy Silvius:

What I like to do after this, when I go through the next stage, which is sorting, I'm going to review my Google sheet. I'm going to review all the questions. One of the big ones too for us, specifically for our, our jobs, is that I want to know how many years experience do they have, and I don't always I don't always tie years of experience to you know their skill level level because there's plenty of people in industries that have been in a shorter period of time and have a much higher skill level than others. But it typically shows me that they've had enough experience with clients and so on. So I look at all these questions that we ask and then I also review their resume, and what I'm looking for here is I want to look for discrepancies, because there's there's a lot of times that you want to make sure that whatever they're answering and their resume are going to match up. Then what I do is, you know, I highlight them personally. So I'll highlight like green if they're going to move forward, or red if it's like a absolute no, and maybe an orange for, you know, potential move to an interview Once I get them in the interview.

Andy Silvius:

Move to an interview Once I get them in the interview. This is a. This would be basically let's call it a three-step process. So I, I have the first interview interview with them, and so I have a series of questions that are similar to the Google form but they're slightly different. And now I want to.

Andy Silvius:

I want to ask them those questions one-on-one.

Andy Silvius:

So we're going to be on camera. We're going to be discussing this. I want to see body language. I want to ask them those questions one-on-one. So we're going to be on camera. We're going to be discussing this. I want to see body language. I want to see how they react. Are they really truly telling me the truth or are they reading off a screen, which has happened many times? It's pretty obvious when you watch someone who's who's reading. So I asked them these questions and if I feel like, based on those and based on the questions I reviewed from the Google form and their resume. If it all kind of matches, then I'm going to move them on to the second interview.

Andy Silvius:

But I let them know, hey, we're doing our round of interviews from today through Friday and then we'll let them know and I'll I'll give them the expectation before the call's over. Like, hey, this is our process, we've got a few more people that are going to be interviewed through the week. By this time on this day, I will let you know, one way or the other, what's going to. You know if you're moving forward or not, and so, if they are moving to a second interview by the end of my first round, I'm going to go email all the people who are moving forward and say, hey, we would love to have you guys back, we would love to have you back for a second interview. Now, for us personally, this goes straight to my wife, because she's going to have the skill level of the business, like she's the one who does the fulfillment for the service, and she's done it for a very long time. So she's better qualified now to understand hey, they were good cultural fit. They seem to have the skill level in the first interview. Now she's going to ask them very deep I shouldn't say very deep much deeper questions and get into whether they're qualified or not, and then from there you know we're gonna let them know. Hey, we've got X amount of people that are doing the second round of interviews. We'll contact you on this date and typically by that final date is where we give a job offer. So we'll send them a job offer with. You know what we're offering for compensation for them, their hours and so on.

Andy Silvius:

And so a lot of times I just I can't. I can't reinforce this enough. This is our process. You can put in whatever process you need in your business, but the key is going to be you've got to interview more people. If you, I've had too many discussions with business owners and obviously my experience is that we create these beliefs off of our past experiences.

Andy Silvius:

So if you have in the past just decided off a whim, like you, hire the first person you see to fill a position because you're in some form of pain or you're trying to solve some problem that you just need to, you just think you need somebody in that spot, and then they don't work out, and maybe you do that a couple of times you start creating this belief in your mind that there's no qualified people out there for this role. There's no one who's qualified enough to come in and do the job properly, or I can't find any good workers, or I can't find any this or that. Then you just create this storyline and so, and then it backs you into a corner because you think that you can't operate your business and you can't grow it because you can't find quality talent. The truth is, it all comes down to you. You're at a point where you're just not good enough to hire people, or you have not interviewed enough people to make a good decision. And I don't care how great you think you are with intuition or your gut feeling. We used to think that as well, and obviously we've had many instances where we hired people based on that and it just didn't work out.

Andy Silvius:

So again, just, I think, figuring out your process, whether you need help with this or not, you know, maybe I can. I'll see if I have all this stuff documented where I can just link it. I do have all my SOPs and everything, but this would be specific for our, our industry generate more outcome or more applications so that you can have a better list of people and sort through it and it will make hiring feel so much easier in your business. Because once you get that first person who's qualified and you start to understand what good looks like in candidates, that's where you really start unlocking leverage in your business and it starts to eliminate the stress of hiring people who aren't qualified, where you're turning around all the time, you're turning over employees all the time, you're having to do so much training to keep them on task. So that would be if I could leave you guys with any actionable step today. That would be my. That would be.

Andy Silvius:

My suggestion is go you know, build a process for yourself. I don't outline it on a napkin. Take mine, for example. Just do you know, generate, generate applications, sort them, nurture them, interview them and hire them. Do something like that and I think that you will really start to unlock more leverage in your business. So I want to thank you guys. This is a new style of episode for me, so if you guys like it, let me know if you guys want more of these or deep dive into some of the stuff that we do and how we're growing our business. I'd love to be able to just jump on here and share those with you and then, if there's anything specific that stood out to you guys in the comments, I'm sorry, there's anything that stood out to you guys in the show I'd like for you guys to leave, leave them in the comments and, yeah, let me know what you think. We'll see you in the next one. Outro Music.