Chapter 7 - Recruitment and Training: The Key To Growing Your Business

The success of your company is ultimately dependent on your ability to recruit, develop and keep outstanding staff.

Quite simply, get the wrong people, you get the wrong results; get the right people and you are in with a very strong chance of succeeding.

People are the make or break of any company.

Let’s take a quick look at the essential subject of recruitment and consider what you need to look for when hiring new staff.

Recruitment

It should be evident from the earlier chapters of this book that it is not just an employee’s skills which make a company great; it’s their mindset and attitude. You therefore need to be alert to mindset and attitude when recruiting, and look beyond qualifications.

One entrepreneur I interviewed some time back has a stable full of horses and over the years has dealt with many vets. He explained that although all the vets he had used had the same qualification, they couldn’t have been more different.

All vets have to spend at least seven years studying for their veterinary exams, and therefore all have the same letters after their names. Yet to him, the distinction between a good vet and a bad vet was all about attitude. Ultimately, it comes down to good vets sharing the same characteristics and traits as the business owners we’ve spoken about in this book. They are passionate about their work, love what they do, and believe in themselves and the services they offer.

Conversely, some of the vets he came across were not very enthusiastic about their work as their passions lay elsewhere.

Recruiting the right people is so much more about personality and mindset than it is about technical skills. Ultimately the success of any high achiever comes down to mindset and attitude rather than technical skills.

When you watch football managers talk about what won them a game, or what they look for in their team, seldom do they say it’s the ability to pass the ball straight from one player to another. They talk about courage and confidence, belief and passion, desire and hunger. It’s these personal leadership traits that you need to identify at the start when recruiting.

Rarely are those qualities demonstrated in black and white on a CV. It’s what happens outside of the CV that you need to look for. It’s important to see your prospective employee through their own eyes to understand where their true passion lies, and whether that passion really suits the job that they’re doing.

On paper, I have the same accountancy qualification as hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other accountants, and I can certainly put forward a CV that looks impressive. However, by looking beyond my CV, and understanding what drives and motivates me, you would very quickly realise that I would be the worst person in the world to employ as an accountant.

Get me to talk about people development, training, leadership, or how to grow companies and I come alive! Ask me what books I read, who I admire in the world of business and what I am passionate about, and it would soon become obvious where my heart is.

Recruiting people with the right attitude isn’t easy. It’s far easier ticking the boxes with a CV in front of you. You need to know what you are looking for. You (or whoever is recruiting) need to understand the mindset of a business owner that we looked at in the previous chapter, and interview based on these traits, rather than just on skills.

Employees who come into your business need to feel that they are responsible for the growth of your company, and that their decisions and actions directly influence whether a customer wants to buy from you (and continues to buy from you in the future).

New recruits need to be consistent with the values that you hold true as an organization.

If work to them is just a job, and a means to an end, or if they do not have a true passion and energy for the type of work or organization you are, then there’s no way that they can deliver any more than just a standard performance for your customers.

You need to be recruiting people who can demonstrate their love and passion for their work, people who have the ability to thrill and wow your customers and give them a remarkable experience. It’s only these employees who will make your company stand out and make your customers want to talk about you.

To download an MP3 interview with a master recruiter, who explains the techniques he has used to recruit thousands of employees — and to download the Duncan Bannatyne interview I mentioned in the previous chapter, simply visit [link in paperback or ebook] and enter your details in the contact box. This will take you through to the download page.

Training

Once you’ve recruited the right people, you must constantly train and develop them. Training is still something which is massively overlooked in companies, or sadly underestimated.

Failing to train and develop staff is no different from expecting Manchester United to win the League or the FA cup without daily training and development of its players. It is no different to expecting a surgeon to perform a complex operation on you, without having first learnt their art, or keeping abreast of the latest developments.

Many organizations still see training as an expense, rather than an investment. I’d like to share my thoughts on this. When you train your staff to think like business owners, you can ultimately re-label the training budget to the marketing budget.

By training and developing your staff to think and act like business owners, you are directly giving your customer the best customer experience you can. In the process, you are turning your customers into the greatest marketing machine your company will ever have.

There is a direct one-to-one link between how your employees serve your customers, and your customers’ desire to recommend you to others (or repeat buy).

It is far cheaper in the long run to become an outstanding company, with outstanding products and services that customers rave about, than to continually spend money on direct marketing.

When you become a remarkable company from the inside out, your customers become compelled to talk about you and do your marketing for you. That will be the most effective and efficient form of marketing you will ever do, but it will only come as a result of trained employees who think and act like business owners.

In the next chapter I will explain to you how I personally go about developing people to think and act like business owners.