Entrepreneurs are afraid to hire the wrong person. And they are right: bad contracts affect team morale, are expensive and can severely damage your company. An average employee can affect team morale and cost you a lot of money. Learn to identify it from the beginning.

Terrible hiring are easy and obvious. For example, one of our first engineers was delayed on average four hours during the first three days. We fixed the problem by dismissing it. But many bad hiring are not so visible and costly. There is an opportunity cost when you keep someone in your business that does not work; And in a startup, this can be the difference between success and failure.

How can you control your fears, so you do not end up with mediocre employees? I share some lessons I've learned over the past 18 years:

Speeding the Hiring Process

Whenever possible, do the work before hiring someone; This will help you understand what skills are needed to run it.

After making several mistakes in hiring, we now only hire a candidate when it seems entirely appropriate. We have had recruiting cycles where after seeing hundreds of applications for a vacancy we choose not to hire anyone. We had also done the opposite: employing several people when we only had one available position. Once you perfectly understand the job requirements, hire the right person, not the best person who responded to the requests (or at least bad).

To choose the best person among many you need to read several resumes, do several telephone interviews and perform at least five to 10 face-to-face interviews.

If you create standards that clearly define the ideal person for the job, Then you will know when you meet her, even when you have interviewed one or two candidates. Our latest hiring in customer service impressed us with your creativity by writing and singing an original song with your resume and references. We only interviewed two people for work; He was the second.

Hiring the best candidate

It has become a cliché to say that you must hire people smarter than you. Many successful businesses do. But the most intelligent and skillful people are not always the right ones for a job.

One of our great mistakes as a young company was not paying attention to the cultural field. You can teach skills, but you can not teach passion, good work ethics, or respect for the collaborative process. When you hire alone ringleader and add him to an active group that works as a team, you can affect all the members and the evolution of the company.

When interviewing, ask the candidate about your more and less favorite projects. Compare the passion with which they describe, the effort they put into each project and the results they obtained. Highly competent employees will be more passionate about the projects they love but will demonstrate proper disposition and discipline in those that are not to their liking, so they also get success despite their lack of interest.

Do not test employees

Several years ago, after making a lousy hiring and fixing the problem, we decided that we would not hire anyone full time without a trial period. Today we employ people with an initial 30-day contract. We pay them the equivalent of the full-time salaries they would receive, but we make it clear that this is a trial period to see how they work with our team and decide whether or not to keep it in the company.

You can identify several problems during the first month, which are not remarkable in the interviews. If problems are significant, you can choose a full-time contract. On the other hand, if the candidate is suitable, you can extend the contract after the trial period.

Do not Fix Your Mistakes Quickly

Many business owners feel uncomfortable when they need to fire an employee. But you can harm yourself and your team if you do not do it quickly when you notice that you made a mistake.

When I look back on our first hiring mistakes, the willingness to quickly dismiss mediocre employees is at the beginning of the listing. An average employee will not only cost you money, but it can also affect the whole structure of the company.

So the most compassionate act you can do when you notice that you made a mistake is to be transparent and fix it as soon as possible.