Few Steps to Find and Retain Quality Staff

Finding and retaining quality staff whether you're hiring employees or contractors, can be a difficult task for many entrepreneurs. There is a myriad of reasons this is true. It takes a focused, strategic approach to hiring and growing your team that will help propel you and your business forward. Igor Roitburg Lives in New York, USA. He is very passionate about his work and Igor Roitburg is Chief Operating Officer at Default Mitigation Management LLC.

Sometimes, though, no matter how well you have hired and how many strategies you have in place for a "good hire" it just doesn't work out and you have to start over. Starting over with hiring and training a new employee or even getting a contractor up to speed on what you need to be done is a drain - physically and emotionally for the entrepreneur and financially for the business.

How can you find and retain quality staff?

Here are 7 steps to take that can help you increase your success.

• Be very clear on what you want the individual to do. If you hire someone and they think they are doing A and you want them to do B and perhaps C, and you didn't tell them upfront, they may balk and leave. If you hire for task A but then add on B and C without further compensation you may have to re-hire or pay to train them, if you are interested. If you believed you were hiring for A, B, and C, you need to be clear about the tasks and the expectations for everyone's benefit.

• Leave the door open for negotiation on tasks and responsibilities. You may hire someone who far exceeds your expectations, and your business grows. It may get to the point where, because of growth, you need to hire a new person who can take on tasks D and E. Don't forget to ask the original hire whether he or she can, or wants to, take on those new tasks if they have the skill set to do them. Don't overlook a chance to promote from within. Just because you hired a person for ABC, doesn't mean that individual doesn't have other hidden talents you've never discussed. The people that get you to one level, might be or might not be the same people to help you get to your next level of success.

• Have a very clear and specific written job description. It is not enough to simply say what you want to be done. Give the new team member a detailed job description - not so detailed that it's novel-length but detailed enough that you both understand the deliverables and agree to them.

• Be open to suggestions on potential changes to procedures. If you have a new staff member who looks at some of your current procedures (assuming you have all tasks documented, which most firms don't) and can streamline them, ask for more details about what they're proposing. If they can help make things easier, more streamlined, or better in any way, encourage them to do so.

• Treat your new hire as a member of the team. No one wants to work with a dictator or a micromanager. If you were clear in your hiring requirements, you should be able to rest easy that the tasks you're hiring for are those which you can delegate and trust the new hire to do on your behalf.

• Train the new hire. Yes, you're hiring the best expert for the job you need done, BUT this new person needs to know how you want things done. Just because they were a bookkeeper in their former position, doesn't mean they will address your books in a way you are expecting. Before you can train, you need to have a clear picture of the tasks you're delegating. Again, this may be a time to say, "We need A done, this is how we've always done it. Hand them a procedures manual to review each procedure. Do you have any suggestions on how to streamline the process?" Don't make them answer immediately. Give them time to settle in and then discuss the task again. If you throw a new hire into the fray with no training, it will be frustrating for both of you and take them a lot longer to get up to speed than it needs to take.