How To Hire For A Role You Don't Understand

As your contracting business grows you’re going to encounter an interesting and complex scenario (and you may have already) that you are recruiting for, and hiring, a role that you know very little about.

Here’s a classic example – you’ve expanded to the point where you’re hiring for a dedicated full-time office manager. Someone who oversees all the complex administrative elements of your multimillion-dollar contracting business.

You get (generally speaking) how you want things to look when it comes to business organization, but my question is do you fully understand the intricacies of managing a CRM, or a project management software?

Have you ever managed five different inboxes while handling all the calls that are coming in? Have you ever developed all these office processes that make sure that no details get missed.

Whether you’ve gone through this process or are about to, you can definitely see how hard it would be to successfully hire and onboard for this.

Maybe that’s why most contractors’ first office manager is literally running out the door in the first six months.

There are going to be dozens of roles like the example above as you expand. Whether it be a marketing manager or an executive assistant, the point is that you are going to run into this situation many times in your career and it’s going to require you to educate yourself on these roles that you may not understand, but you desperately need.

In this week’s episode we brought back Dr. Ken Keis to share his insights and thoughts on this topic. Dr. Keis has been on episodes in the past and is a foremost expert on Personality Styles and how they relate to leadership.

In this episode Dr. Ken Keis shares:

• The exact 5 step method that seasoned employers use to successfully hire for roles they don’t understand.
• The right way to research what responsibilities the new role will have (it’s not google).
• Why it’s a bad idea to copy and paste a job description from another company.
• A process that allows you to select for the right skills AND the right personality.
• The big mistake that almost every employer makes when they first hire for a role they don’t understand.
• What you need in place before a new hire starts that fosters loyalty and eliminates frustration.