How Hiring the Right People Can Impact Your Bottom Line (Infographic)

In a small business, hiring a new employee can be a high-pressure situation; you want to be sure you’re hiring someone who will fit in with your company culture, produce great work and help your business grow. We often don’t stop to think about how a new hire can also impact a business’s bottom line. Let me explain why it is critical to make sure you are hiring the right people for your business’s growth.

What happens when you don’t hire the right employee?

Hiring the wrong employee can have a huge impact on your business. Beyond an employee’s direct costs like a salary and benefits, a “bad” employee can also incur indirect costs like:

• Less productivity
• Increased disengagement
• Additional inefficiencies such as wasted time

Cultural factors, like expected levels of productivity and engagement, are often fostered in your work environment. Having even one team member under-performing can have a ripple effect to the rest of your team, hurting the entire company. These morale issues can cause you more than monetary losses by making it difficult for your business to grow and innovate. In the end, you’ll be forced to recruit and hire a replacement employee, ultimately wasting more of your resources and time.

It is clear hiring a “bad” employee can have some serious negative effects on your company, but how can you hire the right employee and how does that impact your bottom line?

What to look for in the “right” employee

When looking to hire a new team member, I suggest you spend the time to find someone who performs at a higher-level than comparable candidates. Ask challenging interview questions, such as their most and least successful past projects and how they were handled. Or, give them scenarios they would face on a day-to-day basis, and make sure to call their references. I assure you, they are worth the investment in the long run. People who consistently out-perform their counterparts will steadily help you increase sales and profits, ultimately leading to long-term growth in your business.

Hire other leaders and self-starters like yourself. You want team members who are going to be as innovative and forward-thinking as you are with your business. If you have a team of individuals dedicated to building your business, you will be on the fast track to success.

Think of your team as a long-term investment

At the end of the day, you need to look at hiring new people as an investment of your time and money. This means you should consider what kind of return you want to receive on this investment. Do you want an employee that will help you stay on your current growth trajectory or do you want an innovative team member who will begin pushing your business toward success faster than you ever imagined? Whatever the answer is, know that whatever you invest is what you will get as a return.