The Gold Standard of Hiring Practices (Here’s How to Do It the Right Way)

I‘ve shared a lot of tips and tricks about finding and hiring good talent recently, and the topic has resonated with a lot of you. The job market is competitive right now and there are more job openings than applicants, which can make it really difficult to find the right person for a particular position.

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So, today I wanted to share something with you that is going to change the way you look at hiring. Here at Maui Mastermind, we call it the “Gold Standard” of hiring practices and it takes the conventional model and takes it one step further for better results.

The Conventional Model of Hiring

Most business owners hire team members when they have the need. Perhaps someone quit or retired, or maybe business has picked up and they need more help. When they recognize the need, it is then, and only then that they think about the hiring process. Which may work in some instances and economies, but when the labor market is tight, that’s when you run into issues. 

The Gold Standard of Hiring

Now, the gold standard of hiring is where you hire in advance. This is a concept we call a “farm club.”  Professional sports do this all the time. Across the various professional sports in the world there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. How do they manage talent? They have development leagues in place that feed their professional teams.

College sports are nothing more than a feeder system for professional football and basketball teams. Now as a small to medium business owner how can you do something similar for your own  hiring practices?

Minor Leagues

Realistically you can’t afford to hire on fifty people waiting in the wings for a position to open up. That’s not financially feasible. But what if you could look at your company and find places that you regularly do need people – like front desk staff, nursing help, sales people…and then began developing a pipeline of prospects that you can tap into in the future.

Developing Relationships

When thinking about your “farm club” think of it like your own sales pipeline. When we create a sales pipeline we identify a great prospect and we work to open up a relationship with that prospect. It may take time to close a sale, which is not unlike a hiring relationship.

Think about the last time you hired for a position and you had more than one great candidate, so you chose one of multiple great candidates. What did you do with the other ones? If you are using the conventional method of hiring, you wished them well and never thought about them again.

If you are using the gold standard you would take the extra step to build a relationship with candidates that didn’t get the position. Does that relationship mean a lot of work – no, it just means probably two maybe three touches a year. This could be an email, a copy of a great business book or a call to check in. Those extra touches go a long way to building a relationship- because you never know if a year from now you might be hiring again and they might be in the market for a new position.