The most crucial and game changing decisions faced by businesses today is not a question of what should be done, but who should be the one to do it.
- UNKNOWN
The question of who to hire is typically the number one problem faced by employers and recruiters. It is not always a question of what to do. The question of what is more along the lines of what strategies you want to apply for your business, the processes and procedures that go into everything, as well as what variety of products and services you plan on selling. Most managers often make the fatal mistake of dedicating their entire career to the pursuit of answering the question of what and the billions of potential problems that go with it, as opposed to answering a question that could make it easy for them, which is the who question. As a result of this your stress will increase, the amount of money you can potentially make might decrease, and it will eat a good portion of your time that you could’ve dedicated to doing something you enjoy more.
There’s another solution: Reorient your efforts towards the question of who. Who in this case is the people that you will task to make decisions on behalf of your what problems. Who is your leading your sales team? Who is manufacturing the products that you sell? Who is your office manager in charge of administration? Who can make a huge difference between smooth sailing and a constant, uncontrollable stream of headaches.
There are plenty of examples of this in the business world. A company that is currently thriving could once have been privy to the suffocation of employees hired on by an owner or manager who then went on to under perform, at the detriment of the entire organization. So much so, the owner or CEO would be worried, and would have to stay back to manage the company in case they mucked something up, they could not take a vacation because of the worry of what might happen while they were away.
You might ask yourself then, what could have these owners and CEO’s possibly done to warrant such poor hires? Was it that they didn’t assess their resumes and credentials well enough, or that he didn’t assess enough resumes to begin with, before making a choice? Some would spend hours with their respective candidates in order to see if they were a good cultural fit for the company. Usually when vetting and sifting through so much, one would become confident in their candidate’s ability to perform. Some end up being horrible in the actual job, others end up stealing money from the company or some other incredibly shocking thing an employer would not expect and have to put up with other than just bad performance or a bad attitude. And then what?