Hiring to Sustain Growth in Your Women-Owned Business – 2 Things to Look for When Hiring

Women today continue to push to the forefront of small business. In fact, according to an article shown on AllBusiness.com, women-owned businesses make up one of the most dynamic sectors of the new national economy, with the majority of them growing at nearly twice the rate as other companies.
So, how can we as women business owners, entrepreneurs and executives sustain fast growth in the future?

We need to hire and manage team members effectively.

Here Are the 4 Typical Hiring Questions That We Are Asked By Our Women Entrepreneurial Coaching Clients:

* Who do we hire?
* Where do we find them?
* What should we pay them?
* How do we retain top talent?

While these questions are important, there are two issues that must be addressed first:
1. Alignment
2. Transformability

What Is Employee/Organization Alignment and Why You Need It?

Alignment addresses the passion and skills the person brings to the organization and their fit within the company. Alignment has three components:

* Passion
* Skills
* Fit

In selecting an employee, gauge their passion for the work and for the challenge it represents. Identify the skills that are needed to support the continuing fast growth of your company. It could be marketing, sales, operations, or financial skills.

Lastly evaluate how the person will fit into your organization. Fit essentially is how well the person will cope with the "way work is done around here" with the personalities, the pace and the customers.

Addressing the alignment issue without considering the transformability issue will likely result in hiring the wrong person.

What is Transformability – And Why You Should Look For It When Hiring New Employees?

Transformability is hiring the person not for the job as it exists today, but as it will exist tomorrow.

Remember you are getting ready for a new phase in your business. This means, your employees will have to adapt to new ways, new ideas and new roles as you start to experience fast growth.

You want to hire for the job as it will likely exist 12 months from today.

Why?

Because, we are talking about a fast growth company and one of the characteristics of a fast growth company is: Things change fast!

Think about the last time you changed jobs. While we all like to believe that we hit the ground running fast, most of us took time to assimilate into the new job, to the way work gets done, to what is and is not acceptable along with a myriad of other issues that pop up in a new, fast growing organization.

Now consider this: You just started feeling comfortable in your work environment. You come to work the next day and the job has changed to keep up with the fast growth. Now, you need to use new skills and knowledge. Everything is different. This is a fact of life for fast growing companies.

So, How Should Fast Growing Companies Hire for the New Economy?

One of our women owned and operated company clients who provides product-positioning services to the pharmaceutical industry was experiencing rapid growth and was having a challenge finding talent. While she initially needed to fill researcher positions, she knew that as growth continued, roles would expand and change, and she needed to adjust and support the change without having to hire new talent. That's why she asked us if we could help her company address this challenge.

We worked with them to understand not only the job that needed to be done now, but also the likely jobs that would be needed in the future. We asked them to consider the core skills that were required for both the current and future jobs. When this was completed, a profile took shape of what was needed today and in the future. Not surprisingly, no one was easily identifiable who could meet all the criteria. We introduced the alignment and transformability concepts explaining that skills can be learned, development can take place, support can be provided. But it will only be successful if the candidates aligned well with the organization and if they demonstrated in past work that they embraced change and growth (e.g. transformability). As growth continues, they have been able to support it from within.

Now, Fast-Changing Job Requirements Are Not For the Faint of Heart or Bureaucrats!

This kind of job ambiguity isn't for everyone. But if you consider alignment and transformability as you start the hiring process, you are being honest with yourself and your future employee. The probability that you will hire and retain the right employee increases significantly and so do your chances of becoming a company that sustains fast growth in the New Economy.