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Employing the Right People

Employing the Right People

What do you think about when you look to hire a new employee? Ideally, you probably want someone with experience, right?

I’d like to challenge that idea. Sure, experience is great and adds real value to an application, but lack of experience shouldn’t exclude candidates from being given serious consideration.

My point is that you should be looking at other things when you’re looking to hire. Experience might just be the icing on the cake.

So how should you go about the hiring process?

Hire someone based on their attitude and their talent. You can train them up for skills later.

If you can find someone who is passionate about joining your team and learning about your industry, you’ve got a great foundation for a good and productive working relationship.

Experience can sometimes be a hindrance. Hiring an employee that you will train up means you’re hiring someone without preconceived ideas about how things are done and without bad work habits that are hard to break.

At some point in your life you’ve probably heard (or said it yourself) someone saying that they need experience to get a job but without the job they can’t get the experience, right? And if you’ve been job hunting and found yourself in that position, you know it can be quite defeating.

Give someone the opportunity that you might not have had. More often than not, you’ll be rewarded by your new employee’s eagerness, gratitude and loyalty.

So how do you find these people?

Think outside the box.

For example, advertise at universities and try and get the interest of new or almost graduates that are looking for work and have up to the minute knowledge fresh in their minds. We know someone who found an excellent web developer this way by pinning the advert for the job to a university community notice board in the relevant faculty.

In taking the time to train him up as he worked part time until he finished his degree, this computer science graduate came into his own and demonstrated great managerial potential. Only a year down the track and he’d taken on top-level responsibilities and was delegating to the new intake of employees.

As well as advertising in unconventional places, you should advertise for the attributes (not the experience) you want in an employee. Are they passionate? Are they committed to learning? How do they interact with others? And so on and so forth. These are the people that you want to apply for the position, and they’re also the people you want on your team.

We acknowledge that experience is an asset, but by excluding the inexperienced you could be shutting out an entire demographic of workers that only need to be given the opportunity to demonstrate just how much they can really achieve.