How many times has a “not so sharp” job applicant slipped through your ever popular, air-tight, “I go with my gut feeling” interview process and wreaked havoc on your business, poisoned the moral of your other, more-dedicated staff and even more damaging, treated your guests with indifference as you helplessly stood by and watched the “profit and sales” part of the pie chart get smaller and smaller?
Even worse, how many times has a young, gifted, All-Star sales genius who could sell anything to anyone while making your guests feel like royalty ended up as Employee of the Month on your competitor’s team because you disqualified them as a candidate? Why? The candidate didn’t correctly answer one standard, age-old, useless and “vanilla” interview question: “Do you have retail sales experience?” The candidate in question (whom I recently met) answered, “No,” which was not entirely true, because she didn’t think the five years year she spent as a cashier and food server alongside her mom at a deli/gift shop qualified as retail experience. The question asked by the other salon owner – at the salon she now runs – was, “What were your favorite things to do growing up?” to which she replied, “Working with my mom and the other girls at the deli. We’d have contests for selling the most daily specials and I would usually win! The boss, my mom, the customers and the other servers would make the biggest deal about it and it always made me feel really good about myself.” Wow! Talk about a recipe for success! She had Sales, People, Team, Family and Work Skills plus confidence all gift wrapped for you, but you passed her right along to your competitor down the street.
Do you think the traditional model of finding Super Star Staff might be broken? Here are three new hiring concepts to help you find your Dream Team.
- 100% of people who end up as great employees are not lazy. This means they have a built-in good work ethic, so that means one of the best places to find them is at work! That’s right, they probably have a job already. So you must think outside the box and not just rely on the passive “run an ad and they come to you” approach. Always make good relationships with the peeps who take good care of you at places you frequent. Why? Because they might be much happier working for you! Enticing a hot shot to jump ship and work for you is not illegal.
- Standard interview questions like, “What are your strengths?” “What are your weaknesses?” “Do you have retail experience?” “Why do you want to work here?” etc. will get you scripted, practiced responses that tell you nothing about a candidate except that they’re good at telling you what you want to hear.
- Meet the Super Connector – she’s friends with everyone, not shy and loves interacting with people. To find a Super Connector, throw a higher-pressure situation at her to see how she handles it. Hand her a bottle of lotion, give her three features and three benefits of the lotion and two minutes to practice a sales pitch she will try on the next customer who walks into your salon. She may or may not make the sale, but the exercise will tell you far more than the answer to any question you may ask.
