Stop Handing Your Next Hire a To-Do List

Let's start with how you bring someone in because people feel your culture long before they ever accept an offer.

The secret is that you are selling yourself through the entire hiring process.

The way you write a job posting, the tone you take in an interview, how fast you reply, how clearly you lay out what the role involves, all of it tells a candidate what it's like working with you before they've done a single day of work.

Think about who a potential hire meets first.

On my team, the first people a candidate talks to are some of our warmest, most on it people, because that first impression sets the tone for everything.

You might be a team of one, which means the first person they meet is you.

So bring it in those early conversations, because the people you want most are the ones with other options.

And they're deciding if you're worth taking.

And once someone says yes, the way you bring them in matters just as much as the decision to hire them.

It's easy to get someone great and hand them a login and just hope that they figure it out.

But then that first week ends up feeling chaotic and you've taught your new hire that chaos is what working with you looks like.

Here's what setting someone up to win actually looks like.

Number one, mark the moment they say yes.

When someone accepts a role on my team, we send flowers.

It's just a small thing that we do and it tells them we're genuinely glad that they're here.

You can do your own version with a contractor, a warm welcome note or a small gift, anything that says this is a good place to be.

Number two, give them an onboarding plan.

Every new person on my team gets a 30, 60, 90 day onboarding plan, which lays out what they're focused on in their first 30, 60, and 90 days.

So they always know what they're working toward.

You can do a simpler version for a contractor, what you need from them in the first week, what success looks like at 30 days, and how the two of you will check in along the way.

The clearer you are from the start, the more you're setting them up to succeed, which if they succeed, you succeed.

Number three, write down how you do things.

On my team, we keep standard operating procedures, also known as SOPs.

They're just step-by-step docs for how a task gets done so nobody has to guess.

You can do the same.