[00:00:18] EMMA: Hiring. It's a tricky beast, isn't it? As business owners, we know it's crucial, and because we don't necessarily do it every single day, sometimes we're not that good at it. Can I say that? Sometimes we're just not that good at it. So today I thought we could talk about. Not just hiring specifically, but how to hire well and what happens when you don't, and why so many women in business put this off for way too long.
[00:00:45] Little secret. Before I became a coach, I was a recruiter, and then I was a HR director, so I have sat on every side of the hiring table. You can imagine. I've hired hundreds of people across my career. I've also had to let people go, which is. Never fun, but sometimes necessary. And now in my coaching work, I watch my clients go through this same process and I've seen their same patterns over and over.
[00:01:11] Hiring is one of the scariest steps you can take in your small business. And sometimes they're not small businesses anymore, and women in particular tend to put it off. They run themselves into the ground doing everything, wearing every hat, working weekends before they'll actually commit to bringing someone on.
[00:01:29] And I get it. It feels like a huge financial risk. It feels permanent. It feels like you're handing over a piece of something you built from scratch. I hear you, but do you know what? I also know if you want to grow, if you want your business to work for you instead of the other way around, you have to hire.
[00:01:50] And not only that, you have to hire, well, two caveats. First, there are some jobs that you can outsource. There are some AI [00:02:00] tools that you can use to help with systems and processes, depending on your thoughts about ai. and how you decide to use AI and how you actually use it in your business.
[00:02:09] The second caveat is that if you've chosen, actually chosen a lean team and a different business model and I work with some people who wanna just do all of the delivery and build the relationships and have premium pricing, and then they just outsource. And that's cool. Who knows what the future might look like?
[00:02:29] Even for us where we still need to hire, whether that's someone like a Serena or someone who is outsourced. Then we have some clients who really wanna grow. They're like, I want an empire. They have a technical business, which means they actually need to hire humans. We've got a few clients right now that are doing this. Different industries, but similar challenges. Both are trying to hire senior people. Both are navigating what that looks like in business, and their stories are going to run through this episode because I think you'll see yourself. In at least one of them.
[00:03:03] So grab a cup, grab a pen, and if you're that way inclined, jot down your notes and let's get into it.
[00:03:09] Before we talk about how to hire, well, the most important thing I wanna talk about, what happens when you don't because most business owners dramatically underestimate what a bad hire actually costs. You might think about the salary, you might think about the recruitment fee, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, right?
[00:03:29] There's so many things. So let me give you some numbers just to give you this in a bit more. I don't know. Concrete reality research consistently shows that replacing an employee costs somewhere between one and a half to two times their annual salary. So if you are hiring someone at 120 k, a bad hire could actually cost you between 180 and 240K and that's not a typo.
[00:03:54] That's real money walking out the door. And that figure includes everything, the recruitment [00:04:00] costs, the advertising, the time you spend interviewing, the onboarding, the training, the lost productivity, while a role sits empty, the impact on your existing team who have to pick up the slack and it adds up quick.
[00:04:14] The Australian Human Resources Institute estimates the average cost of hiring a new employee sits somewhere between 10 and 25 grand, depending on the role and the industry. And that's just the recruitment piece, just one piece that's before you even factor in. What it costs to actually get someone being productive and no, it doesn't happen on their first day.
[00:04:36] Here's another stat for you. Some of the research suggests that over half of voluntary departures happen in the first six months, the first six months, and around 42% of employee turnover is considered preventable. That means nearly half the time someone walks out, you could have something that's done something differently to keep them.
[00:04:58] I could have a whole podcast episode on how to be a good boss, but I would digress. But I want you to think about what that means for your business. You don't have layers of management to absorb that shock and that cost. You don't have a bench of people ready to step in when someone leaves a team of three or four.
[00:05:19] Everyone feels it. Morale, dips, productivity, dips knowledge, walks out the door, if you're a business owner, guess what you're doing? You're suddenly back doing the work yourself on top of everything else. I talked to a couple of recruiters about this and they said the same thing. Retention is always the most cost effective strategy rather than replacement.
[00:05:40] And that makes sense, right? The money you invest in getting the higher right in onboarding properly, in setting clear expectations from day one, that money comes back to you tenfold compared to the cost of starting over again. And this is exactly why. One of my clients and I recently spent an entire [00:06:00] coaching session working through some key performance indicators, otherwise known as KPIs.
[00:06:06] We looked through that. We looked through the position description. We made onboarding plans before she even. Made the offer to her candidate because the cost of rushing this, it's not just financial. It's months of your life, you won't get back. It's the stress on your team. It's the impact on your clients.
[00:06:25] It's the hit to your confidence as a leader. So if you are sitting there thinking, I'll just wing it and hope for the best with those numbers and those stats. Just sit with that for a moment and let's talk about how we do this properly, like proper, properly. No winging it. And if you've never hired anyone before.
[00:06:49] This part of the podcast might just be for you, and if you've hired before, stick with me because I think there are some reminders in here that are worth hearing again, especially when you don't recruit day in, day out. And when I started my business, I had to figure this out as well. I did it in stages.
[00:07:07] The first person I hired was an accountant, and then the second person I hired was a bookkeeper, both outsourced models, and they knew exactly what to do and what I needed. And then the third person was Serena, my business manager and sister. And she took a lot of convincing, but not only because we were sisters, but because she had a nursing background and an ambulance officer background.
[00:07:29] Not an admin background, no admin experience, but she had always been super organized, caring, and nurturing and smart. So I knew she could figure out the admin and that she would care for our clients as much as me. And that was important. Hiring her was really to manage my calendar because I hated that job.
[00:07:50] I hated that job, and my calendar was out of control. PS what a privilege to be so busy that my calendar was out of control. Huh? Absolute privilege. And once we [00:08:00] had that sorted out, we outsourced our socials and then our website and then basically I outsourced anything that wasn't me coaching, that wasn't me building relationships that didn't need me doing the thinking or the strategic work.
[00:08:12] 'cause my job as the CEO is to build relationships and to do the strategic thinking and the planning and to deliver so well that our people never leave us. Our clients never leave us. So if you're at that point where you're too busy working in your business to work on it, and you know you need help, here's where I'd start.
[00:08:32] It's time to roll up your sleeves and get into the work. And it's big work, right? Step number one, we sit down and we list every task that takes up your time and your energy that you could hand off to someone else. Be honest about this. Include the things you're doing because you've always done them, not because you are the best person to do them.
[00:08:54] For one of my clients, this is report writing. The reports took a chunk of her time, like 50% of her role, and yes, she's brilliant at it, but it was eating up days at a time, sometimes four days a week. She knew she needed someone who could take on half of that workload so she could focus on business development, client delivery, and building relationships.
[00:09:17] Step two, we write a position description, a really clear, really specific position description. What does the role actually involve? What are the outcomes needed? What skills are required? And mainly what does success look like? This is non-negotiable. If you can't articulate. What you need, how on earth is a person you hire going to know what they need to do?
[00:09:40] And it doesn't need to be a six page document, although I've seen some of those, they suck. Challenge yourself to get it to two pages and please for the love of chocolate, don't use jargon! No one cares. I had another client and I went through her existing position description for her and her team's roles, and we realized [00:10:00] that the KPI section was missing entirely the description listed responsibilities, but there is nothing that said, here's how we'll measure whether you're doing a good job or not.
[00:10:10] So we added them in and that one change transformed the document from a wishlist into a proper framework for performance. Number three, hire for technical ability and attitude, or as I like to say, hire for not only skill, but also will, because both matter. There is nothing worse than hiring someone whose attitude is wrong, or it just sucks.
[00:10:36] I've seen it way too many times. Someone looks perfect on paper, ticks every technical box, and then they show up and the energy's a bit off. It might feel like they're a bit disengaged. They can't relax and PS who blames them after an interview situation. More on that later. And you have to also trust your instincts or at least have a couple of steps in the process when you are working in a small team.
[00:11:00] Sometimes in close proximity for days or for long hours. Fit matters as much as skill. You can teach someone process, you can train them on your systems, but you can't train attitude. Don't make the mistake of hiring for technical ability and then having to fire for attitude. Step four, I think we need to consider whether outsourcing might be the right step.
[00:11:23] If a full hire feels too big, you can outsource different pieces to different sole traders or freelancers, and you can hire part-time to begin with depending on the needs of your business. It's a little bit less scary. One of my clients wanted to get on more podcasts, but had been putting it off because she didn't know where to start.
[00:11:43] Now, she could have hired someone. Instead, we outsourced the research to someone who we knew was really good at it, and what she got back was a spreadsheet with a hundred podcasts in her target market, complete with contact details and reasons for selection. Delivered in a week. Sometimes the smartest hire [00:12:00] isn't a hire at all.
[00:12:01] It's a targeted outsource piece that frees you up to focus on what only you can do.
[00:12:08] I would love you to think back to the last interview for a job you had. What did it feel like? What did they do well and what did they do that could have actually been improved? How can you take the good bits and apply them and ditch the bad bits? And by the way, interview processes do not start. At the beginning of the interview, it actually starts when you put the advert out.
[00:12:34] When you go out to market for the role. We're making sure that we map the process to start with before you even know who you've got. We wanna know what every touchpoint feels like. Interviews are so tricky. And a one step process doesn't necessarily bring out the best in people. Nerves get in the way, interviews themselves.
[00:12:54] Fricking awkward. You know the drill. The best process I have seen run is run in steps. A phone call first to see what they're like over the phone. An interview of some sort, a task completion piece, and a coffee. We need to get to know them now. I know you're saying that's a lot, Emma, and I agree with you.
[00:13:14] You wanna do with all the candidates, but you probably have enough candidates to phone screen first. Then you shortlist down to an interview, then you short this down to a task completion, and then you shortlist down to the final couple for a coffee. That is it. It's not rocket science. Now, this is the section that I think will make the biggest difference for most of you that are listening, this is the piece that almost everyone skips.
[00:13:39] You find the person, woo-hoo, you make the offer, yay. They accept, and then they start and you realize you haven't actually told them what good looks like and. You haven't set targets. You haven't defined what success means in their first month, first week, first quarter, first year, and then three months later, oh, you are so frustrated because they're not performing [00:14:00] the way you expected them to, and.
[00:14:03] They're confused because nobody told them. What was the expectation in the first place. You can see where this goes, right? Does this sound familiar? I reckon there's some of you just nodding along going, holy crap, I've got some work to do. Let me tell you about Amanda and I, we built our in our session together because I think it's really practical and a great example for you to adapt for your own business.
[00:14:24] She was hiring a really senior person, the candidate. The preferred candidate is currently working in a similar role in a bigger business. She's experienced, she's commercial, she's got some specialist skills, but she's never worked in a smaller business before. Always for large organizations with loads of resources and loads of people, and Amanda was worried about how to set.
[00:14:47] Expectations around delivery of work, specifically building relationships, which is a really different beast in a small business compared to a large firm. You see large firms have a ton of resources, tools, and people to talk to. Small firm, not so much. We have to do a little bit more, right? So we sat down and we worked out the KPIs for this person.
[00:15:07] There weren't 10, we didn't write 10, we wrote. Three. Three very clear strategic KPIs that will help the candidate feel clear about what success looks like. How should we get there, the impact on the business, because they are invested in both success and business performance. I'm gonna tell you what they were, number one.
[00:15:28] Revenue and billables. This person is senior enough and needs to bill a certain amount per month, which basically means she needs to deliver the work and be able to invoice a certain amount of work a month. And in the big firms, this is basically three times your salary. When I was recruiting, it was three times your salary.
[00:15:46] That number hasn't changed. So we set the target that was super clear for the monthly revenue target, but, and this is important, we built in a ramp up period. The candidate is not expected to hit that number from day one. [00:16:00] It will take approximately three months to get them up to speed in any business. So we need to like just calm the farm a bit and during that time, what Amanda will do to support her is to introduce her to clients, show her the systems, show her how the business works.
[00:16:17] Work out how to get the work delivered in a way that allows her to succeed. You see, the target is clear, but the pathway to getting there is super realistic. Secondly, client satisfaction. It had to be about the 90% mark. This means delivering work that clients are happy with being responsive, managing relationships well.
[00:16:39] It also means on budget, and there's discipline and planning to that, and it's measurable. And finally, relationships. We were really specific about what this means. It's not just about go and find work. It's about building relationships, following up on leads, attending the riot events, and eventually generating her own pipeline.
[00:16:58] But again, with a clear timeline and support structure around it. And during that time, Amanda will be supporting her, showing her how she builds relationships in this business of this size. Thinking about the more relational way they work versus a bigger business, giving her the tools and resourcing and coaching.
[00:17:21] ' cause that's what I'm here for. once we had the three, we kind of organized them in a way so that the revenue target sat first, because that's the primary objective. Putting them in order is important. Everything then supports that. And then Amanda wrote a covering email to go with the position description that explains the support, the training, the onboarding that the candidate can accept, expect, and will receive.
[00:17:46] And that email matters because it sets the tone. It says We have high expectations and we're going to help you meet them. We, as a business are going to set you up for success. KPIs are not about putting pressure on [00:18:00] someone, they're about giving them clarity. And when a person knows what's expected, when they can see the targets and understand how they're going to be supported to reach them, they can actually succeed.
[00:18:12] It's not rocket science, but without that clarity, you're setting them up to fail, and that's not fair on them, and it's certainly not fair on you, and it's certainly not fair on the other people in your business.
[00:18:23] Now you've written the position description, you've set your KPIs, you found the right person. They've said yes. Now what? Great question. Please don't drop the ball. Now, you've invested all this time and energy and money finding the right candidate, and then they walk in on day one and there's no plan, no structure, no one's thought about their, what their first week looks like, let alone their first month.
[00:18:54] You do not want to lose them because your onboarding is rubbish. Is it clear they know what to do? Do they have the right tools to get the job done? Is their MacBook set up for crying out loud? Are you showing them love and attention? Okay, that last bit might sound a little bit soft and fluffy, but it's not.
[00:19:12] First impressions count The way someone feels in their first week shapes how they feel about your business. For months to come if they walk in and it's chaos if no one's prepared for them. If they're left to figure things out on their own, they start questioning whether they've made a right decision.
[00:19:29] And remember that stat I mentioned earlier, over half of voluntary departures happen in the first six months. A lot of that comes down to, you guessed it. Poor onboarding. Wanna know what a good onboarding looks like in a business. Clear documentation. The role, purpose, outcomes, responsibilities, the KPIs we just talked about and broke down.
[00:19:53] All written down, not in your head, on paper, in the hands of the person on day one. Templates [00:20:00] and examples. That's what another one of my client is doing. She's building this for her new hire right now. So when they walk in, she's got everything she needs. Reporting templates, example reports, quality expectations, so the new person doesn't have to guess at what a good report looks like.
[00:20:18] They can see it. This is especially important in technical roles where the standard of work directly impacts your client relationships. A structured first few weeks, who are they meeting? What systems do they need access to? What training is happening and when map it out, it doesn't have to be a 40 page document.
[00:20:40] In fact, I would suggest that it. Could, should, would be a one page plan for the first fortnight. Makes a huge difference early and regular check-ins. Don't wait for the three month review to find out something's not working and don't laugh. Loads of people do that check in daily, in their first week, even every couple of days after the first week, eventually a weekly rhythm will kick in.
[00:21:01] That's a hint. Weekly rhythm. Ask how they're going. Ask what they need, ask what's confusing. Catch problems early before they become reasons for them to leave a report by Veeva. And then Michael Page suggests it can take nearly six months for a business to break even on a new mid-level, higher six months.
[00:21:23] That means for the first half of the year, you're investing so much more than you're getting back, and that's normal. And that's expected. But you need to plan for it. You need to budget for it. Don't expect someone to walk in and perform it a hundred percent in week two 'cause they won't. And if you're frustrated by that, that problem isn't theirs problem.
[00:21:43] That's your problem and it's your expectations. Now in Amanda's case, she was hiring someone who has a lot of skill and is already quite senior. So we reckon three months is all she needs to get up to speed. if she needs longer, that's also totally fine. We know those odds. But Amanda is doing [00:22:00] something which I really like.
[00:22:01] With her hire. She's offered the preferred candidate a 30 minute introductory session. With me as part of the onboarding process. Not because the candidate needs coaching, but it signals an investment in the person. It says, we care about your development and this is the person that works in our business with.
[00:22:19] With us. We are bringing in the external support to help you succeed. That kind of gesture goes a really long way, especially for someone stepping into a new environment.
[00:22:29] I wish I could tell you that if you follow all these steps, every hire will be perfect. But that's not how it works, is it? Sometimes you do everything right and it still doesn't land. The person isn't who they seemed in the interview. The fit just isn't there. The performance doesn't come. And you know what?
[00:22:48] That's business. And it sucks, but it's just business. Amanda had a recruiter who wasn't delivering. We'd been patient, we had given her time. There was simply no progress, no plan, and no accountability. And so we made the call to move on. Meanwhile, a different recruiter was managing the same type of search and had had eight candidates lined up.
[00:23:10] Same market, different results. Sometimes the issue isn't the market, it's the person you've chosen to work with, and I'm not gonna lie. This sucks, especially if you've had a great relationship with that person previously. and my client had a candidate who looked fine on paper, sounded great in a pre-screen call, but was flattered interview, no energy, no engagement.
[00:23:35] And so she had to trust her gut, which was the right call. And when you're building a small team, you can't afford to carry someone who doesn't bring the right energy. We've all been there. The impact is just too direct and too immediate. The cost of keeping the wrong person
[00:23:51] is always, always higher
[00:23:53] than the cost of starting again. The cost of keeping someone who's dragging down your team, your [00:24:00] culture, your client relationships.
[00:24:02] It's harder to measure. It's really hard to measure, but often worse than the numbers I gave you earlier. I promise. And if you made a hire and it's not working, oh, please address it. Have the conversation, be clear about what needs to change and by when. Get good at feedback, good feedback, and constructive feedback.
[00:24:21] And if it doesn't change, make the call. I know that's hard. I know it feels awful, but I've been on both sides of that conversation many times. And I can tell you that the relief on the other side is. Almost always worth the discomfort of the con conversation itself. Hiring well is a skill. Like any skill, it gets better with practice and with the right frameworks and intention around it.
[00:24:46] It's harder to do when you don't hire every single day. I get it. And if you're about to make your first hire or you've been burned before and you're nervous about trying again, here's what I want you to take away from today. Know what you need before you start looking. Write the job description, a clear one.
[00:25:05] No jargon. Incorporate the KPIs. Write the onboarding plan. Do this even before you post the ad. Hire for attitude and capability. Both you can train someone on your systems. You cannot train someone to care. if this episode has hit a nerve and you're sitting there thinking, I know I need to hire Emma, but I'm scared and I dunno where to start, or You've made a hire that hasn't quite worked out and you're dreading going through it again, I want you to know that this is something that we can help you with.
[00:25:36] I've recruited hundreds, if not thousands of people. I've written more position descriptions than I care to even count or remember, and I fired a lot of people, which really sucks. I've sat across from the table from candidates coach, business owners, through their first hire, and yes, had the difficult conversations too when it's necessary.
[00:25:56] The ones where something's not working and something has to change. I've done it all. [00:26:00] Many times over. So if you are growing your team and it feels scary and you want someone in your corner who's been there before, who can walk you through it, who can mentor you in it step by step, I might be your woman.
[00:26:13] Head to Emma McQueen and let's have a chat. Let's just have a call and have a chat and discuss what it is that you need. Until next time, happy hiring.
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