Your business is unique, so why should your hiring practices follow an “industry standard”? Rather than tell you you need to hire a software developer, then a marketing coordinator, followed by a UX designer etc, I’d rather practice what I preach and empower you to work out what is best for your business.

At Lucida we have a proven values-based process to help growing start ups and SMEs build the right team to accelerate growth. This can be broken down into three sections:

• Define
• Design
• Deliver

I believe if you work through this process, you’ll have a much better idea of the next new roles you should hire for. Test it out for yourself!

Define

Take the time to consider how your business is growing and what specific skills you and your current team have (and are lacking).

In the case of most small businesses, your team might just be you or your co-founder. This moment of self-reflection becomes even more important to recognise the skills and experiences your organisation currently has. How do you like to work? What makes you keep showing up to work everyday?

Or, broken down in a different way, define your:

• Mission
• Vision
• Values, and
• Purpose

Having a clear idea of these factors helps you understand your core values and identify candidates who share these values and will add to your culture fabric.

It’s equally important to consider what is driving your business growth:

• Has your growth been entirely due to personal connections and word of mouth?
• Is a particular product or service driving most of your growth?
• Is your business growing because of existing clients adding more services or through acquisition of new clients?

Asking questions like this and more will help you better identify the skill sets that will help take your organisation to the next level.

Design

Prioritising your hires is the next step, once you’ve defined your company’s specific growth path. For example, hiring a technically excellent app developer may not necessarily make the most sense if you don’t have a steady funnel of work for them to complete.

Map out your business growth stages into one month, six months, one year and three year timeframes. As a small team, things change quickly. Understanding your short term goals will help sharpen the areas in which you need immediate support.

At the same time, it is beneficial to allow for some blue sky thinking to understand your end goal - is it to be acquired? Grow to over 100 clients? This helps not only your current team, but your prospective candidates, visualise their future opportunities within your organisation.

Deliver

And finally - time to bring your planning to life and start actually hiring! We find that taking the time to really define and design your people strategy helps build employee personas that make it easier to hire for growth.

Having a clear idea of your values and vision helps you stay the course in regards to hiring as your business evolves. It also encourages more diverse hires as you’re more aware of the traits that would be culture-adds to your team.

To close the loop, it’s important to measure the impact of your hiring decision. Like any other part of your business, having meaningful metrics for hiring helps define and benchmark success.

After all, building a team doesn’t end when the contract is signed. Employee retention, productivity and engagement are the real indicators of a successful hire and if you don’t measure this on an ongoing basis, how can you know if your new hires are really shifting the dial for your business?

We know it’s a big deal when it comes to your first hires. You’ve worked hard to get your business to the point of needing more hands on deck and hiring talent is a significant investment.

If you’d like a bit more guidance, or some extra help making that first hire, feel free to drop me a message at hello@lucida.io.