Better Hiring Starts with Better Expectations
After working with hundreds of entrepreneurs, I’ve realized one of the biggest misconceptions about running a business is that entrepreneurs don’t care all that much about hiring; and that employees are just interchangeable cogs in a wheel.
You and I know this couldn’t be further from the truth.
First - if you don’t care about your team, you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. Hard stop. Even if you have to make difficult decisions about your people, which sometimes means firing or moving them on from the business. If you don’t love them, you don’t deserve them.
Second - hiring, especially for smaller companies, is a really big deal. You’re looking for someone who has the perfect combination of amazing Core Values fit and the right skills, who can meet their performance targets, is satisfied with their comp plan, and chooses your company over all their other options.
You invest time and money into the hiring process: vetting, interviewing, onboarding, training, and getting them generally up to speed - all of which can easily take 6 months or more.
You get it wrong, and it’s painful and expensive. Even if you learn to quickly deal with a situation that goes wrong, it’s still better to get hiring right.
And you’ll still get it wrong, at least some of the time. Hiring is a big leap into the unknown, but there are things you can do to increase your success rate. Chief among them is setting better expectations.
By that I mean setting better expectations for new hires, but I also mean setting better expectations for yourself.
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When you hire a full-time employee, you’re effectively buying a full-time workload. And the confusion often starts right here. What does a realistic, full-time workload look like?
If you’re basing your expectations on how quickly you could do the job (especially if you once DID do the job as an independent contributor or someone in delivery), you’re probably already way off-base. I’m not blowing smoke here, but just know that you are special. And because you are so very special, you cannot use yourself as a realistic benchmark for an employee.
Instead, you need to benchmark what performance looks like for what I’d call a B+ player. Not your top employee, but someone who you are definitely very happy to have around. They set a high bar but not an unreachable one. And that’s the bar you benchmark against - not yourself or even your A+ star performer.
(Incidentally, this benchmarking also protects you financially. I’ve seen too many companies build a forecast around employees who have an overly optimistic view of how well they’ll perform. Expect that B+ performance, and build your financial projections around it, too.)
With an appropriate benchmark in place, you can then set the right expectations with your employee of how they’re expected to perform. They’re reasonable, realistic, and set a standard that you can then hold them to.
Expectation-setting starts with the job description (and even with how you determine the appropriate compensation range for a given role). As your team moves through the interview process, don’t let expectations get squishy. I often see this happen, where interviews will ignore or sugarcoat the more difficult parts of the role. Instead, you want to be really up front, especially about the hardest parts of the job where you’re the most likely to get resistance. The right person, the one who will eventually make it to the end of the process AND succeed in the role, will rise to the challenge.
Of course, being clear requires laying the right groundwork. So if you don’t have a defined reporting structure or accountabilities for each role, you need to put that structure in place—before the job posting goes live, not once you have a new employee on board.
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A new hire doesn’t become your next great employee just because you told them what to do. You need to make sure they do it, and that’s where ongoing management comes into play. A manager’s role is to keep team members on track, ensure they are hitting their benchmarks - with extra coaching or training if needed, and to optimize each individual’s performance. If you have a team member with superstar potential, their manager should help them achieve it.
This work never stops. Businesses live and die by how well expectations are set, how effectively they are communicated, and how accountable the team is held to meeting them.
You can’t expect greatness until you start setting great expectations.
