The success of most organisations lie in the quality of employees they hire. This importance has largely led to the norm of treating your employees right first, before the customers; for if they’re treated right, they’ll make your customers feel truly cared for by your company.
Hiring great employees to handle various tasks at your organisation or small business isn’t optional, but a must. They’ll ensure your operations run smoothly, bring up ideas for the organisation’s success, handle customer satisfaction right, and stay loyal to both the organisation and the employer.
But what happens when the employee isn’t just a great one, but one better than you the employer? How do you handle them? How do you prepare for some negative attitudes? And how do you ensure you’re not pushing them away because you have an ego problem?
See Also: 3 Hires That Can Make Your Small Business Revenues Explode
Here Are 5 Things You Must Know Before Hiring Someone Smarter Than You:
1). Understand What They Will Do For Your Company:
The first thing you need to do before hiring an employee better than you is to really understand what they’d be doing for your organisation. This involves personally taking on various roles in your organisation and knowing exactly what it takes to get things done in each department.
With a full understanding of the proposed job role the supposedly rockstar employee is to cover, you’d know whether you truly need the employee, if the employee’s impact would affect the performance of the department, and what exactly it means to be a great worker carrying out that role.
By identifying the flaws and strengths of the position, you can better focus on finding someone who doesn’t just have the strengths of the role, but also tackle the flaws better than anyone else.
2). Know Their Limitations:
An amazing resume can lead you to make mistakes in your hiring process.
Before you get excited by that resume and jump right into hiring that stellar employee, it’s important you have a thorough interview with them, ask about their past jobs, and more. The goal of this intense question and answer series is to know their limitations.
No matter how good a person is, he/she always has a limitation. Your job as both an employer/recruiter is to dig up part of it. This will help you know how far the employee can go, and what they’d naturally find repellant.
See Also: How To Start A Company Without Any Business Skills
3). Determine If Their Presence Can Really Increase Your Revenues:
Will hiring this rockstar make your revenues jump? Will the employee add greater value to the organisation than the previous person holding the position? Will not hiring this person lead to lower revenues on the short or long run?
If hiring an overly talented employee will have no positive or negative impact on your revenues, then it’s a wrong call to add this individual to the team, since you’d be spending weigh higher on the person’s wages.
4). Check If They Have An Ego Problem:
Extremely smart people sometimes have ego problems. Some of them want to be respected at every opportunity and always have credit given to them no matter what.
Irrespective of how smart and effective some rockstar employees can be in taking your business far, sometimes they feel some responsibilities should be passed on to other people, and not them. They feel they deserve more space and only highly intellectual tasks, and would sneer at any responsibility placed on them that a lower level staff could have handled.
Before hiring that individual, find out about the person’s experience in their previous workplace, from someone still working there. If you can, get a body language expert in the same room with you during the interview, so the person can observe and pick certain cues about the employee’s personality.
See Also: 10 Ways To Build A Successful New Business
5). Drop Your Bias:
You need to know when to put your personal ego and bias aside to do the right thing.
When a really smart potential employee is key to the success of your organisation, not employing the person because they’re better than you are could negatively affect your organisation’s growth and performance.
When you spot rare and great talent, take advantage of it, and hone it to perfection. If the employee is paid well, and feel cared about in the organisation, they’ll do anything to see the business succeed.
What are your thoughts on these 5 things you must know before hiring someone smarter than you? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
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Excellent job done on this your write-up. Indeed not following these points can lead the employer hiring the wrong person.
Such people with great qualifications, most of the time,have ego problem; throwing their weight about at the least opportunity, and so, like you stated, such people, during the interview should be observed critically in terms of their body language.
In an organisation that I worked, the owner employed a guy as the General Manager, for a ONE-BRANCH company, with a very high salary. And before he knew this GM couldn’t perform because his qualifications as stated on the CV couldn’t match the work performance at hand. He couldn’t kowtow for the existing employees to show him how the company’s systems worked.
And in just about two years this GM had to be made to resign or be fired for non-performance. Meanwhile, his salary alone had eating deep into the finances of the company, which began making losses.
A great mistake made by the owner that l observed was, in the first place hiring a GM for a one-branched company, having a total staff strength of just about 12, including himself, the owner.
Such are the mistakes being done by owners of, especially, SMEs which lead to such enterprises dying prematurely.
And, you know what?, the owner of the company, in my story, had to sell the company to other people.
Thank you Samuel for this insightful story. Especially for taking your time to share it in details.
I’m glad to have you as a reader and as someone who contributes positively to the blog.
Have a wonderful time!
Thanks Stan. I hope we can connect on the LinkedIn platform too. Search for me with: Sam Bediako-Asante.
Sure we can. I’ve added you already.
Thank You So Much For Your Insight Very Helpful