Recruiting for growth: why filling today's gaps won't help you scale your business
Many business owners think about recruiting like this..."I have a job I desperately need to fill, and I have to find someone who can do it as well as possible, and as soon as possible".
Which makes sense.
Or does it?
Because when you recruit with this mindset, you're overlooking an important thing. In a growing business, the job you’re filling today may bear little resemblance to the job your recruit will be doing in twelve months.
Key Takeaways:
Recruiting for the current job, and only the current job, means you'll outgrow that recruit faster than you'd like
Capability is important for today. Judgement and autonomy are what will deliver for your growing business over the next two years
The clearest sign you're recruiting for today rather than tomorrow is writing a job spec that's boils down to a list of tasks
The bigger your business gets, a candidate's ability to make a reasonable call without checking with you first will matter more and more
Is there really anything wrong with recruiting for the job in front of you?
No there’s not…on its own. You need the job done.
What's missing with that approach is any thought about what that job becomes as the business grows.
For example, the person you recruit to manage just a few clients right now might need to be managing many more next year, with two people reporting to them, and making decisions you currently make yourself.
Recruit purely for today's role, and you can see how things might pan out in that scenario.
What does "recruiting for growth" look like?
What it doesn't look like is ticking off a list of capabilities that would enable someone to do today's job.
Most job specs we see simply present a list of the activities a candidate would need to undertake... answer the phones, prepare reports, manage the team roster. While this is all important, none of it tells you whether the person in front of you can function when nobody's told them exactly what to do.
And there will definitely be times in your growing business when that’s exactly the situation they’ll find themselves in.
So when you’re recruiting for tomorrow as well as today, before you write the spec, ask what this role could potentially look like in eighteen months if the business keeps growing at the rate you want it to. Then build room into the spec to account for that version of the role, as well as the current one.
When recuriting for growth, you'll end up testing for different things entirely…less about whether the candidate can do certain tasks, and more about whether they’re likely to make a reasonable decision when the task in front of them isn't the one you described.
How do you test for that in an interview?
Interviewing is tough. You need to be “on” during the whole conversation to ensure you’re not just hearing a candidate’s responses to questions, but also picking up on non-verbal cues that give away all sorts of “truth-bending”.
So not only do you need to listen (really listen), but you also need to be watching.
It's exhausting...
When you're recruiting for growth, you need a different approach to interviewing than perhaps you’re used to. Questions like "have you done this before" won't get the insights you need. So start asking how your candidate dealt with a situation that was unfamiliar to them but needed immediate action.
A few that work well:
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision without checking with your manager first…what happened? How did you make your decision?
What's something you changed about how you did your job, without being asked to?
Describe a time when you spotted a way to improve something in a business you worked in. How did you approach the issue with your manager? What was the outcome? What would you do differently if you had your time over?
With questions like these, you're listening for whether a candidate took ownership of their decisions, or whether they waited for confirmation from their manager. The difference matters more than almost anything on a resume, because a business that's growing needs people who'll confidently deal with what’s in front of them, not people who'll escalate everything back to you.
Won't this just slow things down when you need someone urgently?
Maybe. But maybe not.
If you’re thinking only about the short term urgency, the answer will be yes. Over the longer term though, getting it right will repay you. Because your new recruit will grow with the business and won’t need replacing in six or twelve months.
When a role's urgent, the understandable temptation is to grab the first person who can start immediately and ticks all the right boxes for that role today. When you give in to that temptation, you end up with a team that's technically fine but with little capacity for professional growth.
Slower, more deliberate recruiting for roles that will expand as the business grows is the difference between building a team and just filling gaps.
It's not a luxury...it's a necessity.
Why do some owners recruit a clone of the person who's leaving?
This happens a lot because it feels like the safest option. Someone's leaving, they were good at the job, so obviously you need to find another version of them.
But again, that misses the point of recruiting people with the potential to grow with your business. So when someone leaves, it’s important to first of all understand why they’re leaving and second, whether the role is still the same as you think it is.
Every time someone leaves, it’s critical to ask what the business needs from this role now, in the context of where your business is heading. And then logically, what are the skills and attributes of the person we need to fill it.
Sometimes the answer may well be a clone of the last person. More often, the role's shifted enough that the recruitment brief needs to shift with it.
As a side note, but related, another thing owners frequently do is recruit people they know from previous lives. That might be ok, but it’s something you need to tread carefully with. The underlying question is whether the role you’re recruiting for suits the skills you know they have and can develop. It’s not about familiarity…
When you get this wrong...
You end up having to refill the same role, quite possibly often.
Take the person you hired eighteen months ago. They've been pretty good at the job, but they're still doing it exactly the same way they always have. That would be fine except the role has begun to outgrow them. The more it changes, the less they cope.
So you face a difficult situation. Do you manage them out of the business or let them discover for themselves they no longer fit? Either way, you’re back in the market. But the reality is if you allow them to come to their own conclusion that it’s time to go, you’ll just get there more slowly. And that delay won’t be good for the business.
A situation like this happens when you don't test candidates beyond their capacity for completing today's to do list. Every time you recruit for today rather than tomorrow adds one more person to the team who's waiting to be told what to do, just when your business needs fewer of those and more people who can think for themselves, take on responsibility and just get on with it.
What if you've already got a team full of "today" people?
Most owners reading this aren't starting with a blank canvas. You’ve already built a team, recruited at various points for whatever jobs needed doing at the time. What we're talking about here doesn't mean undoing what's been done.
But it's worth doing a bit of an audit on your current team to understand who's operating with autonomy, taking responsibility without checking in, and growing into more than they were originally recruited for.
Also to understand who’s not.
The second group isn't an automatic problem because some roles really don't change much as your business grows. But if it's most of the team built this way, that's worth thinking about because it usually means most decisions are in your court, and that becomes a growth constraint.
It's a different approach...and change is never easy
It's a different way of recruiting to "who can do this job right now," and it takes a bit more time up front. But it's the difference between a hire that fits today and one that's still fitting in two years.
If it's useful to talk this through, you can get in touch or book a time directly.
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