How Do You Staff for Success?

How Do You Staff for Success?

Poor hiring decisions have real consequences, and you pay for it in real money.

How much time do you spend dealing with the bottom 10 percent in your organization?

Along with your money, when you hire team members that don’t belong on your team you are literally giving away the one, non-renewable resource you have — your time! Oh, not to mention that thing I hear everyone in management paying lip service to — being considerate and respectful of another human being.

Hiring Mistakes Cost Real Money

(Excerpt from my series The 5 Core Truths in Leadership and Team-Building Success)

Hiring the wrong people will cost you much more in the end. Let’s assume that in the US an average employee makes around $40,000 / year (USD); apply taxes, benefits, and other related costs you easily arrive at an additional 30% in additional costs, conservatively. This brings the first year’s costs to $52,000. Once hired, most hiring-mistakes will generally hang around on the payroll for 12 months before they exit, many times because the hiring manager doesn’t want to deal with the uncomfortable conversations.

Undoubtedly, each addition to the team will have an initial investment of another team member’s time involved – whether this be your’s, a manager’s, supervisor’s or co-worker’s time in coaching, counseling or directing corrective action. Let’s conservatively say three hours a week are invested in this manner, and even assume it is someone of the exact same annual wage ($52,000 / year). If the average employee works 48 weeks of the year (1920 hours), this organization would spend almost $4,000 of another person’s time in activities focused on your bad hire. This means your organization is paying someone $4,000 / year to steal time from performing team members which could otherwise be spent with customers generating revenue and ensuring customer satisfaction!

Expanding this to a revenue generating position, like a sales representative with a minimal $40,000 / month quota, would cause you to miss $360,000 additional revenue the first year (considering a 3 month ramp with no sales). And what of the potential damage this person might cause in lost customer confidence, angering customers, missing service levels or sales goals?

Do Something For Yourself

Hiring is almost as much art as science, and the challenges of the daily routine are rigorous enough. So don’t subject yourself to this. I had the privilege of studying under one of the greats of management and relationship practice, Mike Riordan. From that I learned that it takes a great team of Linchpins to do great things.

Learn more about how you can supercharge your hiring process by joining me next week for a candid interview with Director of PathShare at GreatAmerica, Sally Brause, as we discuss hiring MPS sales talent and how to staff for success in MPS.

You can register here, and even if you can’t make it you’ll be sent a recording of the webinar!

Ken Stewart offers observations from the field of managed print services in his weekly column on MPS Insights every Tuesday. As a senior consultant with the Photizo Group, he comes from and works directly with channel providers in the managed services space, developing educational tools and resources to promote lasting business transformation.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Get the latest industry news, and follow ChangeForge on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

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