 How to hire a successful team is a critical task for every entrepreneur and leader with a growing business. As a manager of a team, your performance is closely linked to the performance of your team. Hiring the right team members can make or break a team. In this video, I share my best tips of how to hire the right people for your team to help you deliver great team performance. And at the end of the video, I share a hiring method which works even better than the traditional interview process to hire great team members. My name is Jess Coles and I've led and managed teams over 25 years in corporates and household names through to SMEs. I've had to build teams in companies experiencing periods of high growth as well as turning around failing businesses. I've also won best team prizes at national magazine and at company level. If you're new to this channel, Enhanced.Training provides online business courses to help professionals, managers and business owners improve their performance. And if you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe and share it with friends. So let's start by looking at how the leader of the team impacts the hiring quality of team members. Hiring the right team members can boost a team's performance and hiring the wrong team members can wreck the team. Looking at the statistics, having the wrong business partner or team members is one of the top three reasons for new business failures. And if you think larger businesses can escape poor hires, think again. The quality of the team impacts decisions at all levels. The more senior the decision maker, the larger the impact of those decisions. And plenty of large businesses fail because of poor decisions being made. So hiring the right team is a critical job of any leader of a team. Getting the hiring right and getting everything else right becomes a lot easier. Hire the wrong people and that hill just became a big mountain. If you listen to interviews or talks with the likes of Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or in fact any leader from a growing business, one of the first things they talk about is how they go about hiring the right staff to create a successful team. It is amazing how much time leaders of successful companies personally put into the hiring process. The design and how the hiring process happens of course, but also doing some of the actual hiring themselves, the direct reports of course, but also outside their direct reports. I was at Innocent Drinks when it had over 200 employees and one of the three founders still interviewed everyone before an offer was made. That's how important they viewed the hiring of their staff. So as a leader of a team, we need to put enough time and effort into ensuring that the hires we make are the right hires and lift the team up in terms of the team culture and team performance. I personally don't think that the leader of a team has a more critical job than hiring the staff that are going to go and work in that team. I'd love to get your views in the comments below. So let's talk about how we can improve our chances of hiring the right people to improve the success of our team. Let me ask you a question. Which is easier to teach? Skills or attitude? In my experience, teaching skills is a lot easier, hands down. I think you could influence attitude. I don't really think you can teach it as such. Therefore, getting the right attitudes in the people we hire is a lot more important than getting the right skills. I mean, imagine your job as a manager with a team of self-starters. You know, those willing to make decisions and take action compared to a team who need you to make a decision on everything. I know having a team of self-starters is a lot more fun as a manager and as a team you deliver a lot more in terms of output. So building to your recruitment process, a focus on discovering the candidate's attitude and approach as well as checking on their skills. The key message is to hire for attitude and cultural fit before hiring for skills. A company that has not taken the time to identify its own collective values will struggle to hire the right team members to continue building the company culture. If you've not done so already, before you write the job advert, sit down and write down the company values. For most, company values remain a little bit abstract. To overcome this, agree and write down the behaviors that you're looking for in people that have the same values as the company. Behaviors are much more tangible and are easier to describe and train others on what to look for. You can also test for and observe behaviors during the hiring process. By being clear on team or company values and behaviors, you set yourself up and your team up for hiring people with the right cultural fit and attitude. Hiring the right team members gives you really strong foundations for success. Research has proven that people with a similar cultural fit or values to the wider team are firstly a lot happier, they're more effective when working with colleagues, they do a better job and they're much more likely to get promoted quicker. All of these are valuable firstly to the individual but also to you, the manager of the team, the team itself and the company. Recruit for behaviors and values first and everyone will be better off. A key step in the hiring process is to work out exactly what problems the new person will have to solve and therefore what skills you need them to have to enable them to do this. A surprising number of companies don't do that well in this step of the hiring process. According to Glassdoor, 61% of employees say the realities of their new job differ from the expectations set during the interview process. And of course, company and team requirements change as businesses grow and adapt to new situations, new markets, new competitors, et cetera. The requirements should not change that much and say the three months between writing the job advert and the person starting. So future proof your hire is much as possible by looking out for people who enjoy learning and have skills that you expect to need in the near future. This reduces the number of hires that you'll need to make over time, gives you a route to promote from within and helps you build a successful team more quickly. Once you know what type of person you want and the skills needed to overcome the problems you face, you're halfway to hiring a person who's gonna make your team much more successful. If you're in a larger business with lots of management layers or at least one more management layer, make sure that you take the time to communicate to all the hiring managers the value and behavior requirements that you want in the candidates that you hire. Think about what steps you're gonna put in place to get hiring consistency across your business. I mean, some of the days include writing down the values and behaviors and creating a training session that all hiring managers must attend. Or you could create a step in the recruitment process where you have a values and behaviors-based interview undertaken by a small group of senior managers at the end of the process. Or you could use specific personality assessments or tests in your hiring process. Whatever you choose to do, don't take for granted the importance of training all hiring managers about what is needed and why it is needed. Put in place training to cement these requirements into the hiring process. I've always found it useful to get the team members involved in the recruiting process for several reasons. Firstly, getting team members' views helps. Firstly, to give me a different point of view which might confirm or challenge by thinking on a given candidate. Second, to spot behaviors or points that I've missed or the candidates kept from me. And importantly, to get the team's input into the hiring decision and therefore create better buy-in for the person who's gonna come on board. After all, they have to work with a new joiner too. Candidates can often be a lot more off-guard in an informal setting when they're meeting their future colleagues rather than their future boss. So creating this setting can reveal quite a lot about each candidate which is a really useful step in the hiring process. Use the feedback you receive. And I usually do this in a group setting so that everyone involved can input into the process and give feedback and then you can make a decision to hire or not in the meeting or following the meeting. Involving multiple people in the hiring process helps get a balanced view of each candidate. And I think generally leads to better hiring decisions and better team buy-in and results in a better, more effective team. Lastly, while the traditional interview process is a time efficient process for the hiring company once the candidate develops strong interview skills it can be much harder to work out if that person will work out well in practice doing the actual job. So I have an alternative approach to put forward which is a lot harder to gain. During an interview process you're asking the candidate to describe how they'd approach a given situation or solve a given problem. They can provide real examples or make them up. 85% of people apparently lie on their CV per hire right. One assumes answers given in the interview are not always accurate and the interview will only pick up on so many of the inaccurate answers. So rather than getting the person to tell you what they have done get them to show you or demonstrate how they use their skills. This approach is much harder to gain and gives you a much better assessment of their skills and ability to solve your problems. Hence audition rather than interview. We suggest trying to build the audition around a mini project that the person can do in your offices for maybe half a day or so. Let me give you an example of how to set these exercises up. Firstly, invite the candidate into your offices and explain that you'd like them to work on a mini project while at your offices. Tell them they can speak to anyone in the office and ask for any information needed. The output could be a presentation outlining their findings and conclusions. Some ideas for the types of projects you could include might be, you know, firstly, creating an outline marketing campaign via email and social media, for instance, which would include indications or maybe even going into the detail on the content, timing, the audience, maybe their testing process. Or it could be restructuring a team to respond to the changing needs of a business. Or it could be creating analysis on a set of customers with recommendations on how to proceed to increase sales or to increase profits from that customer group. Create a project with an output that would help you solve or start to solve a live problem or a recent problem which is not in the public domain. This approach gives you a real insight into firstly how they actually approach their work, their problem-solving skills within your team environment, how they interact with your team, you know, their working style, their ability to form productive relationships, their likability, et cetera, how they work under pressure and the quality of their output versus other candidates. And there's a whole host of other benefits. It also gives the candidate the ability to actually work in the offices and meet a lot of people that it might be working with. And this gives them a great feel for the style of how the company operates and if they want to work there. The downside of auditioning is that it usually requires more time from the candidate and from your team overall. Considering the benefits, this is a very, very good investment. Auditioning provides a lot more insights into the person and their abilities than a traditional interview process. Obviously, set up the mini project carefully and free up the team members so they can help the candidates while they're actually in your offices. Think about how you could use this approach in your hiring process. The people that you hire into your business will help make or break your business. Your team are incredibly important to get right, whether you are four people in the business or 400 or even 4,000. Attract and keep great staff members and your business will have a huge advantage over those that are not able to separate the great from the okay during their hiring process. We know that many managers and companies do an amazing job of hiring their staff. There are many more companies that do not do as good a job as they could because they have not taken the right steps to set themselves up for success. Hiring the right people into your business or team is a critical activity for any growing company. Make sure you spend enough time setting up how you're going to hire really well. Do visit us at enhanced.training and take a look at the courses and resources to help you manage your team more effectively. If you like this video, please hit the thumbs up button below and subscribe and hit the bell to get notified of our weekly video releases. This really helps us produce more videos to help you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to seeing you again soon.