40% of Owners in Service Related Industries Report They’re Bad at Hiring

Have you been facing hiring hurdles?

 

If so, you are not alone.  40% of business owners in our industry have reported that they are terrible at hiring even in the best of times and, today, we know is one of the most challenging hiring environments in recent history.

 

85% of businesses in our industry report that they have been growing this year and, with millions of businesses struggling to find employees, hiring has never been more critical or more challenging than it is today.

 

So, what do you do when your job ads aren’t working!?!??

 

Getting the right people in the right role is so essential to your success that you have to try different techniques if what you’re doing right now is not working.

 

Remember that job ads are designed to attract the best possible candidates for your business (which is why I told you all about your candidate avatar a few weeks ago).  Consider how much time and effort you put into the overall marketing of your business and then think about how much time and energy you’ve put into creating a “help wanted” ad and marketing it.  

 

If you are not getting good candidates to apply — or any candidate for that matter — there are few tweaks you can make to your ads and your process to help increase the odds of their success.

 

To jump start a few ideas for you, I’ve put together a quick video.  Check it out here.

 

I work with business owners every single day to help them solve their trickiest business problems.  Let me know what hurdles you’re facing right now and I’ll be happy to share some ideas with you.

 

Not how much someone would reasonably pay you; not how much you would or do charge; how much it is really worth?

 

If you had one hour and you could spend it doing the thing that you are very best at, what would the return on that hour look like?  How much could you save your business, or make for your business, or improve in your business?

 

As the owner of a business, as a leader in your company, your time is one of the most widely undervalued assets.

 

When people think of assets, they think of the money in the bank, the machinery and tools in the warehouse, the property deeds in their name.  While those tangible assets are valuable, consider the magic that you can make happen with your time and talents.

 

Let’s imagine for a moment that you took that one precious hour and you used it to contact a new builder – someone who built 7 to 12 homes a year – and they fell in love with you, your company, what you stand for, what you do.   You won their business.  How much was that hour worth?

 

Let’s imagine you invested that hour in getting to the root cause and fixing an issue that was leading to your installers having 2 incompletes a week.  How much did you just save your company – not just in the combined time and hourly wages for multiple team members, but in good-will with your customers too.  How much was that hour worth?  

 

Do the math.  Calculate out not only what it was worth in this moment, but in this month, this year, and the life span of your business.  

 

Your time is one of the most precious assets in your business because, as the owner, the manager, the leader, you are particularly well-suited to do the high-value activities that yield tremendous dividends in the long and even in the short term.  

 

That one activity –considering the true hourly value of just one hour of your uniquely valuable time – is the keystone of the Money Test.

 

You see, every activity in your business has a worth (not wage, but worth) to it.  When you look honestly at your time and ask yourself if you’re filling it with low-worth but nevertheless mandatory tasks – I mean who wants to run out of copier paper or miss an important phone call or not have creamer for their coffee – you may see something that you didn’t see before.

 

Anyone can buy toilet paper.

 

Anyone can refill the copier.

 

Anyone can answer the phone.

 

But you, you are the one who needs to be tending the big relationships with vendors and possible partners.  You need to be setting the tone and the culture by the way you give your time to your team, the way you lead them, train them, support them.  You need to be devoting yourself to the things that will save your business money, make long-term gains, sustain the business for the future.  

 

Most small to mid-sized business owners spend far too much time in weeds, in the right-now urgent tasks that, with a little foresight and planning and effort, could be delegated beautifully to others, and then neglecting the truly high-value important thing that will yield returns long after that hour has passed.

 

Are you?