Your business is growing, and your needs are expanding. Youâre hiring for a newly created role. You post a job advertisement and collect dozens of promising candidates. After a thorough application review, you narrow the field and bring in a select group of candidates for interviews. One candidate stands out: Their qualifications, skills, personality, goalsâeverything aligns perfectly with your organization. You make them an offer and they accept. Everything is going according to plan.
New Job Struggles
Flash forward three months. This is the critical periodâaccording to ADP, 25 percent of employees will leave their jobs within this timeframe. Youâve got a comprehensive onboarding program in place. Your new employee has had time to learn your organizational structure and business processes. Youâve painted a big picture of the role and slowly ramped up their responsibilities. You think youâve set manageable 30-day benchmarks.
But your employee is failing to thrive. Theyâre having trouble managing their tasks and arenât hitting goals that seem eminently attainable. Is it possible that your great new hire isnât so great after all? You were so certain about them when you brought them on board, but now youâre seriously questioning your judgement.
Guess what: You probably didnât misjudge your âperfect hire.â When employees in newly created roles struggle, the problem usually isnât with the employee. The problem is with the role.
Newly created roles are on the rise. Sometimes these new positions involve little more than title tweaks designed to appeal to the egos of potential applicants. But other times, and with fast-growing companies especially, thereâs a lot more involved. Youâre bringing in somebody to take on responsibilities that no one else in your company has ever tackled before.
Problems and Solutions
Every new hire is the solution to a problem. If the problem is your website looks ugly and outdated, the solution is hiring a web designer. If the problem is your customers are emailing you with questions and youâre unable to respond in a timely manner, the solution is hiring a support representative. If the problem is your diners are waiting too long at tables before they receive service, the solution is hiring another server. You get the picture.
When devising your solution, youâll break it down into objectives: the skills and responsibilities that are required to properly address the problem. For example, you may need your web designer to be well-versed in HTML5 and able to work on tight deadlines.
All too often, however, hiring managers create a list of objectives that contradict each other.
Contradictions
Contradictions occur when a role requires one employee to possess opposite skill sets or to prioritize conflicting responsibilities. An extreme contradiction would be expecting your web designer to also take on the responsibilities of an accountant. Chances are your contradictions will be less extreme. For example, you canât expect a support representative who is busy responding to customer calls all day to equally prioritize proactively reaching out to customers to ensure theyâre not having any trouble.
Itâs okayâand perhaps even likelyâthat your newly created role will be complex and multi-faceted in scope. At startups and small businesses especially, employees wear a lot of hats. Your support rep whoâs busy with calls may very well also reach out to customers and interface with developers and write help articles. But you canât define their success by their ability to do all of these things equally well and with equally stellar results.
When constructing a new role, itâs imperative to really home in on the problem this role will solve. Your focus has to be narrow. The broader it is, the more likely contradictions will emerge. Thatâs not to say the role canât broaden over time, but that depends on the strengths of your employee and the emerging business needs.
The cost of hiring new employees can easily exceed $5,000. The last thing you want to do as a growing business is waste money. If the employees youâre hiring in newly created roles just arenât working out, contradictions could be the culprit. Your new hires canât thrive if theyâre working to achieve competing measures of success.
Before you question your candidate-assessment skills the next time an employee in a new role seems to be struggling, it may be worthwhile to reexamine the objectives of the position first. Determine the problem the role is solving and the necessary objectives involved. Your perfect hire will get to work accordingly and most likely reaffirm your confidence in your own judgment.
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