I was reminded of an important point today: We are oftentimes limited in the projects we can take on, simply because we don’t have enough capable people in our organizations.
We have new products to launch, markets to enter, marketing initiatives to execute; why aren’t we? Every single one of our businesses has an endless list of important strategic priorities that we can’t execute on today simply due to lack of bandwidth – we never have enough responsible, entrepreneurial people to handle everything we want to do!
It’s a common theme to recruit people only once you have a project for that person. The combination of the time horizon for sourcing, interviewing, signing, and onboarding a new person and the speed with which the business evolves at the early stages, we will always have more high-ROI projects than people to execute on them.
As entrepreneurs, we must always be on the lookout for the smart talents that can step up and over time become the leaders of our future markets, products, etc..
I am yet to see an organization with too many talented people. Time is always our biggest bottleneck – recruit AAA people and gain additional operational leverage. In the current environments, financing is never an issue, as long as the projects provide a great ROI.
Whenever you find yourself with an opportunity to grow your business further, the one thing you would love more than anything else is to have recruited a great person to take responsibility for this, six to twelve months ago. That way, she would be fully onboarded and well up to speed on your business so that she could take full ownership and execute with the required understanding, context, and urgency. Recruit today so you don’t have any regrets in the future.
Recruiting people with future projects in mind is obviously different from recruiting for a specific project or role as you can’t be as specific in your pitch. It is therefore important that you talk more about the sorts of things the candidate could do rather than exactly what they will do.
From my experience, being able to recruit (future) rockstars and to set the right level of expectations for them are the two single most important skills for any leader. Take a proactive approach to growth – your future self will thank you!
If you’re looking for inspiration on how to recruit the best candidates, I shared our approach in this post.
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Image credit: JoinCakre