The most painful part of the hiring process is going through all the steps and all the candidates.
Today I helped a client hire a project coordinator they believe will help them move from $2.5 million to $3.5 million. It’s not just one person — it’s the team they’re building. I’ve worked with this company for over 10 years. We started when they were around $1 million. Now they’re at $2.5 and climbing.
They received 80–100 resumes for one hire.
20 looked okay.
5 were worth talking to.
1 final candidate.
When we evaluated that one candidate, the last couple of years of work together made the decision clear. We had reviewed many candidates over that time and clarified the job description. When we reviewed the project coordinator role and compared it to the candidate’s self-assessment results, most indicators pointed to a very strong match.
These are the steps we’ve taken with them over the years to refine their hiring process:
- Job benchmarking and self-assessments for great hires
- Interview questions testing candidates with real-life scenarios
- The steps in their interview process
- From poor hires to great hires
Job Benchmarking and Self-Assessments for Great Hires
Over the years working with this company in their certain roles, we’ve created their job descriptions and looked at the self-assessment results that come across from their candidates. From looking at the job description, we can very easily tell what behaviors, tasks, and communication are needed in the role, and what type of person best matches that based on their DISC self assessment results!
No self-assessment tells you everything. What it does tell you is the potential and where their strengths are or naturally can be. Then, in the interview and hiring process, we use that to extract how much of that potential is already a strength and a talent that can be delivered on. To know if you’re hiring potential or if that potential has already been turned into a strength through a developed skill set. To know if we are hiring potential or someone that can already deliver.
To be clear at times we have to hire both, this way we at least know the difference when making the decision. It’s empoweirng to know how we will have to support this person. Are we training them from scratch, or do they already have the skill set and you just have to train them on your systems? Those two are a big differences!
That was always important for us at the CPA firm. Were we hiring a CPA out of school that needs 2-3 years of training or one that was up to speed and just needs to know and be training on our systems? Knowing that is vital to the allocation of your staff time and energy to support that person and what investments you will have to make in them.
Interview Questions: Testing Your Candidates with Real-Life Scenarios
One of the best things they did in their hiring process was test the candidate with real-life scenarios in the interview process. They’re a builder, so they gave examples of actual challenges — a difficult customer communication, a contractor issue, something going wrong on a job — and asked how the candidate would respond.
That’s one of the best things you can do in an interview: present the exact challenges you know you’ll face, based on specific situations and see how the person thinks through them. Our Mastery programs outline plenty more of these sorts of interview questions across all sorts of industries and roles. This is one of the most important things you can learn to integrate into your interview questions in your hiring process.
The Steps in Their Interview Process
They also shared they walked through the following steps with this candidate, which was an enhancement on their process from years ago:
- Phone interview
- In-person interview
- 90-minute team interview
All steps went well.
From Poor Hires to Great Hires
This conversation highlighted the real challenges small business owners face when hiring — especially when sorting through 100+ resumes or more for one single role.
I remember how inefficient hiring was at our family business almost 20 years ago — too many interviews, not enough systems, far too much time wasted, and too many wrong hires. All it takes is one wrong hire to cost us so much.
Over time, we learned how to scale and refine the process. That’s what these steps are about — job benchmarking and self-assessments, testing candidates with real-life scenarios, and refining the interview process.
This was one company’s journey to implementing these steps to master their process and get the people in place they needed to scale from a little less than $1,000,000 to $2.5 million now and moving toward the goal of $3.5 million.
That’s exactly what our team building and hiring classes teach — from Essentials to Mastery — how to build systems, define roles clearly, define your org chart, improve interviews, and recruit the right talent for decades to come, while avoiding many of the wrong hires you can avoid and will cost you so much.
When you understand your organizational chart, your job descriptions, and the talent you’re looking for — and you commit to refining your hiring, interviewing, and recruiting year over year — you gain insights most business owners never do.
To summarize, the steps are simple:
- Job benchmarking and self-assessments
- Interview questions testing real-life scenarios
- A refined interview process
- Moving from poor hires to great hires
I’m grateful for calls like this, especially because now I get to share this executive summary with the learnings I shared with them on our call with you. If you want to learn how to strengthen your hiring process in your own business, let’s connect!
