6 Hiring Mistakes To Avoid – What You Need To Know

These six mistakes are the mistakes that I see a lot of people making. They’re very common mistakes, but they are mistakes that should be avoided at all costs. Because one of the main problems that I find business owners have is their hiring. And this isn’t just hiring your team.

It’s also when you are working with clients as well. These mistakes are mistakes that either cost you a lot more money further down the line. Or a lot more time than you need to invest, and it often ends up in business owners becoming burnt out and overwhelmed. Eventually, they actually just don’t make that jump again so if they have made these hiring mistakes.

They’re often reluctant to go through and try to hire someone again. Because they feel that they’ve been burnt, and they have become overwhelmed, they’ve not got the results that they expected. And therefore, they just filled it, not for them.

That makes me really sad

Because in business, when you then come to hire a team, which, in all honesty, at some point, if you have a business and not a hobby, you will need to hire some sort of help. We cannot do it all ourselves and this often happens when we are established, or when we have a client base. When we start maybe turning work away because we just can’t do it anymore.

That’s usually when the time comes that people feel that they need to start hiring some support. So, I hope these six mistakes that I often find help you to avoid making the same mistakes, further down the line, when you are hiring your team.

1. Lack of clarity on the role

So, Quite often, I find that people think of a virtual assistant as being the jack of all trades, being the master of all being a unicorn. And, in actual fact, a virtual assistant is an implementer. They are told what to do, and they do that thing. They cannot create a marketing strategy that’s effective for your business.

They’re not marketers, they cannot submit your tax accounts. They are not accountants, they cannot do the management of your project. They are not business managers. You need to really get clear on the role that you are expecting someone to do for you. Because virtual assistants are business owners in their own right.

That doesn’t mean that they are a marketer that’s going to then get you results. Or that they’re a business manager that is then going to get you the results because every marketer would tell you this. That a marketing strategy is unique to each business, your competitors are unique. Where you stand in the industry is unique. So the strategy that you need to follow for your marketing is not going to be the same as your competitor over there.

And it’s certainly not going to be the same as someone that’s in a completely different industry

Although the foundations of it may be similar. Eg that you do some social media marketing. The actual process involved in that social media marketing is not going to be the same. Your tone of voice is not going to be the same. And you really need to be thinking about this when you are feeling that you need to hire some support. So really think, and get clear on what role you’re hiring for.

If you can’t give the role a job title, then you’re not clear on what that role is. And you need to sit down and really think logically about what the expectations are from that role. So what do you need to get from that person in that role? Do you have a strategy in place and therefore, you just need an implementer, and that’s completely fine. But let’s face it, if a virtual assistant was a marketer, They would be charging marketer rates!

For people to hire a virtual assistant to be a marketer, and then say, but I’ve not got the results

It’s no surprise because they are not marketers. I know I’ve used marketing as an example here but there’s plenty of other industries that I find that virtual assistants are pulled into. Ultimately people always say, Oh, you need to hire a virtual assistant for that.

Whereas, actually, if you can’t pinpoint what that role is. So, it treats it like you’re hiring an employee. You need to be clear to that employee. What that role is. Otherwise, you’re not going to get someone with the right experience. And this is exactly the same when you are hiring a self-employed person or over another business if you’re doing business to business.

You need to be really clear on who you’re hiring, in order for you to hire the right person. Otherwise, it’s going to be very sporadic and then you may hire someone that can do some of those things that you need but actually further down the line. You find that they’re not experienced or their skill set doesn’t match what you really need. So get clear on the role that you are hiring for.

2. Expecting a unicorn

You cannot expect one person to be an expert in everything to do with business. And although virtual assistants predominantly have their own business, they would do a lot of the things that you’re asking them to do for their own business. It doesn’t mean that they have experienced it, it doesn’t mean that they are going to be able to be a marketer or they are able to be a salesperson.

And ultimately, a lot of virtual assistants come from an admin background, which means that they are, they get the things on the actual strategy around that thing that needs to be pulled together by someone that’s an expert in that particular field. And if you have a virtual assistant that you’re expecting.

We stick with a marketing example here, if you were expecting them to be a marketer and pull together a marketing plan a marketing strategy

Track your marketing metrics. Look at your competitors and see what your competitors are up to. They are not going to have the same skill set as a marketer to be able to look at that, because everyone’s business is different.
And although that may work for their business or it may work for someone else’s business. It’s not necessarily going to work for you. And what you then end up with is not seeing the results that you’re expecting, or the journey to where you want to be for your results is a lot longer because there are so many strategies out there.

There are so many things that you could be doing in your business, and ultimately you then end up focusing your time on the things that aren’t working.

So you end up investing money and investing time on things that aren’t bringing your return. Whereas if you retired a marketer, to be able to pull that stuff together for you, and then had a virtual assistant implement it, your results are gonna be a lot sooner. And they’re going to be a lot bigger. So make sure that you are not expecting a unicorn that knows everything because that simply is not the case.

And it doesn’t exist. Sorry to say, but it doesn’t. You can have an amazing virtual assistant, you can have an amazing business manager. But ultimately, if you haven’t got that structure in place where you have the strategies and you’ve hired an expert at that thing, then you’re going to be kind of on this hamster wheel of trying to get to where you need to be, but without any real clear guidance and direction.

3. Not clear on the hiring responsibilities

So, again, you need to be really really clear before you hire someone on what their responsibilities are going to be. You need to be able to tell them the responsibilities because, ultimately, like, everyone. They may be virtual assistants, but their skill sets could be very, very different. So what they’re going to be responsible for will be different, and you need to be clear on what you want that virtual assistant to be.

Do you want that virtual assistant to be able to work independently, for instance, do you want them to be able to do admin assistance or do you want them to do more executive pay assistance? What does that look like for you? What are the responsibilities that you really need that virtual assistant to have in order to push your business forward?

And again, this kind of steps upon the unicorn side of things because if you’re not clear on the responsibilities of what that virtual assistant is going to do

Ultimately, you can hire someone that’s an amazing executive assistant. They have no idea when it comes to tech. And that’s where, if you actually don’t need the executive assistant but what you need is tech support, you’re not going to have hired the right person because you weren’t clear in what you expected.

And you thought that actually, that one person could be a tech person, and could be an executive assistant and could be this something else that’s not necessarily the case, and sometimes it means that you have to hire. Hire different people for different roles, but you need to be clear on the responsibilities in order to get the right person in the right seat at the right time.

4. You don’t have your systems and processes in place

So, this kind of steps upon having your foundation set up. So, most of the time, what happens in business is, we set out, and our objective is to make sales logical, we need to make money, so we need to make sales. And then, the more sales we get, the more money we get. Then, the less time we have. And what we then find is that everything is in our heads and everything needs to be done by us, and we have bottlenecked ourselves. And I get it when you’re starting out in business. You think I don’t need systems and I don’t need processes.

That’s for big companies, and it’s, that’s so so not true because systems and processes, help in any business, and even helps in life, because ultimately if something happens and you need someone else to be able to do that thing for you, or you in business you get so busy with client work, and it’s things that other people can’t do that the stuff that other people could do for you is in your head, and then what you think and you end up being torn between.

Well I even need to sit down and tell this person exactly what they need to do because it’s all in my head or I can just do the thing

Doing the thing is going to be quicker than sitting down telling someone else to do it for them to then go and do it. So by having systems and processes in place, you’re getting a business up that enables you to step away from it.

It enables you to when you get to that point of being too busy and you hire the right person at the right time, that you can then hand that particular system or process over to that person to do. And that means that everything isn’t in your head, you’re not going to spend as much time procrastinating because you have to rethink what you’re going to be doing at each stage.

And it, therefore, creates a business that is more sustainable, because if you are creating if you’re not creating systems and processes. Your business is not sustainable. Because it’s dependent on you and your family because it’s in your head. You cannot create a business that then enables you to delegate to team members or to someone else, without having systems and processes in place.

5. You’re not investing the time to hire the right person

So again, most of the time people aren’t planning, they’re not forecasting, and therefore they’re not preparing for when they expect that they would need to hire a team member. And what then happens is you, you really push for getting this out you push for doing the business you push for growing the business and you push for all these other things that actually when the business thing grows, you’re in a state of emergency because you’re, you’re thinking, I really need some support now. And actually, I needed support a week ago.

Whereas if you had been planning and forecasting, you could have foreseen that so if you’re if you are setting your goals and you know that actually when you take on one more client. You need to start looking at support because taking on a client after that client is going to be virtually impossible timewise for you.

But if you’re not planning and setting goals for that you’re not going to be able to foresee it before it happens

You then end up in this cycle of panic hiring, and that’s such a bad place to be because that’s where most people, then only hire people based on recommendations or based on the first person that they see.

And that then means that you’re not hiring the right person for the right job, because you haven’t had time to prepare, you haven’t had time to set the responsibilities, you haven’t had time to look at your budget. You haven’t had time to look at the overall person because although getting recommendations is fabulous.

It’s not always going to be the case that that person works for someone else works with someone else for what they expect because your business is unique and you as a person, are unique, so your expectations and your requirements and your, what you want them to be responsible for is going to be very, very different to someone else.

So, though they may say, this person is amazing they’ve done amazing things in my business

They have probably done their homework before, and they’ve ended up hiring the right person for them. But that’s not necessarily the right person for you. So make sure that you are investing time to prepare to hire, don’t panic. And if you are in that, in that panic mode where you need to hire someone.

I really really urge you to just spend some time working out what you need and get so you get the right person because ultimately if you hire the wrong person ends in disaster. It ends in in just chaos, you end up hiring the wrong person you end up investing tonnes of time in training them telling them what to do to them find out that they’re not the right person at all, you end up investing money in this, you are investing money in someone that actually is probably a lot slower than someone else doing the thing because you didn’t realise that they’re not experiencing what you need them to do. So making sure that you are investing some time is really, really important.

6. Not clear on your hiring budget for expectations

If you are expecting a really, really big skill set or experience. So for an example here. We’re sticking with virtual assistants as an example. If you want someone that has the corporate experience that has worked at board level or above. You are going to be paying more. It’s the same as anything. If you are a smaller business locally, and they have a PA, working in their business. That pa is not going to be paid as much as a PA that’s in the corporate world.

And that’s because the experience, the skill set, the requirements, and ultimately the expectations are usually a lot more, and people that come from corporate are very very used to working at a very high level that requires a really kind of thing done, that is never good enough.

Ultimately, so you want to make sure that if that’s the person you need that you have the budget for that person

If you don’t have the budget for that, then you need to rethink what you were looking for. Do you really need someone with corporate experience, or can you work with someone else that has maybe some other experience that is really, really required for you as a business.

And ultimately, most of the time people with corporate experience. It’s usually people that are very established in their business and really, either in the scaling stage or very very close to the scaling stage that needs someone with a higher-level experience.

So make sure that your budget aligns with what you need.

You don’t want to be looking for someone in the corporate world, or someone that’s been in the corporate world, and expect that the budget is going to be the same as someone that has maybe lower level admin experience because ultimately you’re not going to find that person.
And it’s going to end up becoming a real headache for you because you’re going to feel like that person doesn’t exist, whereas they do

It’s just that the actual budget that you’re going to need for that person is more than what you were expecting, so you need to be really realistic with what you can afford versus the experience and skills that you really need in the business and, ultimately, what the benefit is for that. So, I’ve run an implementation agency. I’m not, I’m not the cheapest person around, I know that. 

I’m happy that I’m not the cheapest person around, but ultimately what I bring to the table is the fact that I have a team of people that have all different skill sets.

So, for you to have to find the pool of people that I have is going to be a huge headache. But having that go-to agency where you can say, Actually I need some help. I’ve got a PA, they’re fabulous, but I actually need some help with my tech stuff. Do you have anyone that can help me, and I either have people in the team, if we don’t have the capacity.

I will have recommendations of other people that you could maybe look at, but that’s why our clients are happy to pay the agency rate because they don’t want the headache of trying to work out and hire people for different skill sets because they don’t have that pool of people around, to be able to rely on effectively.

I hope this article on 6 Hiring Mistakes To Avoid has helped

It’s quite a long video site, but it’s something that’s really, really important and I think especially for businesses that are really growing is just to understand that actually, if you avoid these main mistakes that I find people make when hiring, the team life is so much simpler.

And it’s so much easier, and ultimately you need to be making sure that you’re always forward planning, and if you’re not forward planning, you will end up in this state of panic, and that’s somewhere that none of us want to be. Want some help with your systems? Get in touch.