One of the primary responsibilities of a Leader is to hire the right people for the right roles for their teams. It is such an important activity that it can’t be left to either the HR business partners or anyone else.
One of the things we can do if we really want to become a Leader worth following is to always be recruiting or looking for people we can hire to be on our team.
Apart from a host of other benefits that this has, it also has the added advantage of creating a pool of candidates for us to hire from. We can start looking for these people in our company (in other teams) or those who are working for our competition, customers, partners, suppliers and even in our social interactions.
What is important is that we make a list, not just a mental note, but maintain an actual list somewhere, with their contact information and list down what about them made us include them in our list, so that we don’t forget them or the quality that they brought to the table.
If you are like most of us, you might not have open positions at all times to hire for. However, this mindset shift allows us to build a pool of people whom we would like to hire on our team whenever a position opens up.
This has multiple benefits – it speeds up the entire hiring process and reduces the reliance on the recruitment team to create a pool of candidates to hire from.
If your experience is anything like mine, they are not necessarily the best set of candidates and the process to go through all of them and we would be lucky if we are able to finalize and hire from the first batch.
On top of this, if we are to do this well, we are always looking to recruit based on cultural fit, attitude, aptitude and qualities that are more generic and abstract than any specific traits. In my experience these are the foundations of good hires.
Once we have a specific position that opens up, we can look at the pool of candidates that we have and look for the best fit for the specific role among them.
If we extend this idea a bit further, we should always be looking to identify someone who could replace us at a moment’s notice. This could be someone from our current team or someone else from within our organization or outside of it or a combination of all of them.
Just like with everyone else on the list, we continue to follow their arc and keep them in our radar over time – connect with them every once in a while and work to build a trusted relationship.
This allows us the freedom to take on any opportunity that comes our way – either for ourselves to move up or away or on our team without having to worry about the team, when we know that they will be in good hands.
