How to Hire the Best Talent

Many entrepreneurs, at one point or another, hit a ceiling of what they can reach on their own. To get over that plateau and grow your business, you must hire a talented team that is more capable of executing your vision than you are.

There is emerging talent in every industry, and the best thing you can do is find talent and put them to work on your vision, while helping them get to where they want to be along the way.

I’ve spent years honing in on a hiring process that attracts and retains the best possible talent for my companies.

The first and most important step is attracting talent. How do you get the creme de la creme of your industry to come work for you?

Create a compelling vision. You must be able to craft and articulate a vision for yourself and your organization that attracts people. If you can perfect this skill, and make your vision bigger, then your potential hire can imagine themselves fitting their vision inside of yours. Imagine a bubble, if you are able to fit another bubble inside of your bubble and it expands… then your bubble expands too. Vision, I have found, is the number 1 thing that attracts the best of the best.

The next part of the process is putting a together an efficient and productive interview process to make sure the talent you hire is placed in the right seat on the bus. You must become an expert at interviewing and asking questions to discover who is emerging talent and who is not.

One part of my process is asking the candidate what their life looks like in five years. I paint the picture that we are sitting in the same spot, five years from our meeting and they look at me and say, “David, the last five years have been great because …. “. By asking unraveling questions, you will be able to determine what motivates them and what makes them tick. Once you have found winning talent, you can retain them by ensuring they are on track to achieve what they have painted for their own five-year vision.

It is better to hire someone who is already a fit than to hire someone because you like them, personally. Once you have the right person on the bus, you must ensure that they are in the right seat. You can hire the smartest and most talented engineer in the world, but that doesn’t mean they’ll make a great CFO.

The hiring process doesn’t stop with finding talented individuals. Great talent is like a thoroughbred. They will need a vision and a leader to challenge them to achieve their full potential. Make sure you have a top-notch leadership team in place, a work environment that will make employees excited and motivated to get to work each day and a really big vision!

The final piece of the hiring puzzle is structure. This is the least fun but very important part of hiring. This is where you get legal involved and have agreements in place that protect yourself as well as your people. When hiring the best and brightest, it’s important to protect your own intellectual property. You need to make it easy to stay and difficult to leave, because once you’ve hired on a super-star employee your goal should be to retain them.