Improve Your Hiring Process -- Think Strategically!

With every hire, at a minimum you should be thinking about your future company rather than merely filling a current need. Ask yourself where you envision the individual fitting in the company three or five years down the road. Could he/she potentially be a future partner? What’s their long-range career path going to be? Certainly, you hire somebody to fill a specific role, but that doesn’t preclude you from also thinking long-term and striving to identify an individual you envision growing into other responsibilities down the road.

We’re talking about the future sustainability of your business. Why WOULDN’T you want to look at every single potential hire as someone who could potentially play a larger role in the future? Hiring with your future business in mind will help you grow faster and larger, as well as streamline the onboarding process immensely. When you take on a long-term perspective when hiring new employees, you’ll quickly discover that not only do your hiring decisions become different, the way you view and treat candidates also significantly changes. 

A strategic hiring plan

Rather than reacting to a current need, or anticipating a short-term need and hiring to fill that role, consider implementing a strategic hiring plan to help you become more proactive in your hiring practices.

A strategic hiring plan will help you identify:

• What roles do you anticipate the next two or three hires filling?
• What skill sets will those individuals be required to have?
• What personality traits should those individuals ideally possess?
• Whether an existing team member (or a new hire today) could be groomed to fill one of those roles a year or two down the road?
• Based on previous hires, how and where the best candidates were found, and what specific qualities have made them an optimal fit for your team?

Finally, try to avoid the common pitfall that many advisors fall prey to – seeking out carbon copies of themselves when evaluating potential new employees. As the team leader/CEO, it’s up to you to define what types of people you believe will best work and have the most success as a member of your team. But keep in mind that you’ll likely need to seek out other skill sets and complementary but different personality types depending on the individual’s role and responsibilities. 

Coaching Questions from this article:

1. Looking three to five years out, what is your strategic hiring plan, and how will your current team account for the technical and relational skills these additions necessitate?
2. How might you improve your strategic hiring plan based upon your current plan for future growth?
3. Is your portfolio of talent as balanced as your clients’ portfolios of investments? What might you look for in future hires to help strengthen and broaden your team’s skills and culture?

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