You’re probably reading this post because you’d like to make great hires. You may be reading with trepidation, worried that making great hires is complicated.
Well, luckily for you, making great hires is simple. In fact, it mostly comes down to telling a good story.
Let’s examine what you have to do to tell that story and make great hires.
Why Do You Need a Great Hire?
The story we need consists of high-quality answers to questions about vision, execution, expectation, and impact. Together, these answers explain why you need a great hire.
To start your story, we need to answer questions about your organization to ground your audience and set context.
Paint a customer-centric picture of your vision to build excitement for a future worth pursuing.
Describe how far you’ve come on the journey to achieving your vision to help convince your audience you’ll make it to the end.
Once you’ve given context for the organization, tackle the role.
Connect the hire to the vision; what needs to be done and how you’ll be able to tell that they’re doing well. Describe ‘good’ vs ‘great’ performance to help great candidates visualize themselves achieving greatness.
Articulate the impact a great hire will have; the more important to the overall organization's success, the better.
A Delicious Example
Perhaps you have a pizza restaurant. Your vision might be, “We’re going to make the best pizza in the neighborhood.”
If your pizza restaurant has good execution, you may have a seasonal pie made from local ingredients that customers rave about, even if your other menu items aren’t as popular.
You tell people, “We want to make the best pizza in the neighborhood, but only one of our pies sells out every single night. We’re proud of that pizza, but we want more!”
You have an expectation about what you need to do next to achieve your vision. You need a new pizzaiolo.
You start telling friends, “We need a new pizzaiolo to help us craft a better red sauce. It could be good with ingredients from our current supplier, but it’d be great to develop a new recipe using ingredients from local farms.”
You don’t want anyone who hears this story to mistake the impact of the right pizzaiolo on your restaurant.
You always finish by mentioning, “Our dough is already wonderful, and if our red sauce can match it, we’ll have the best pizza in the neighborhood and we’ll sell out every night.”
Get The Word Out
Once your message for prospective great hires is clear and includes all the pieces mentioned above, you’re ready to start spreading the word.
With an unclear message, trying to get the word out is like a bad round of telephone: the message doesn’t even make it from the first to the second person in the chain before it’s distorted.
A story for great hires is easy to remember because it follows a logical pattern often seen in storytelling. Additionally, because it describes something valuable (a great organization looking for someone great to make an impact), it is a story people will be proud to share.
There’s another word for “proud to share” in today’s parlance: virality.
Every time a new person hears your message, its reach increases. Your job is to shout it from the rooftops.
Next Steps
This advice is easier to read about than it is to put into practice. It’s common to think you have a clear understanding of your vision, or the difference between a good and a great hire, but struggle when you try to write it down.
Take a few moments to consider a hire you need to make. Answer the questions above about vision, execution, expectation, and impact. Once you have your answers, try telling them, in story form, to a friend or colleague.
If you find it to be a harder exercise than you anticipated, at least now you know what’s stopping you from making great hires. And great news – you can always ask for help; that’s why I started Lightwork!