The Business Growth Blog by Rob Cuesta

The Three Questions you have to ask yourself every day

If you're a business owner, then - if you're anything like me - you spend quite a lot of time thinking about how to grow your business. That begs a question: what do we mean by "grow"?

Think about why businesses exist, and especially yours. You probably have a lot of "higher" reasons for doing it, which are about helping people to solve a particular problem and avoid a particular "pain" in their life, providing a certain experience for your clients and customers, maybe changing the world in a particular way. However, no matter how much you try to hide from it (and some people hide more than others),there is no escaping that starting and running a business brings with it a lot of pain and sweat and heartache, and only one thing can make us accept all that happily:

Why recruiters have it all wrong - part 2

Have you ever worked with someone who, on paper, looked like the perfect person for a job, but over time it turned out they just didn't have "what it takes" to be successful in the role?

In the previous post we looked at some of the pitfalls of the traditional hiring process, and why it can be fatal for a company that is hiring in order to grow. The reality is, most interviewers are great at spotting people with the right skills for a job, but not necessarily the few who have "what it takes" - especially if the interviewer hasn't, themselves, done the job they're interviewing for.

So what can we do to avoid those pitfalls? How do we know if someone will have "what it takes"?

Why recruiters have it all wrong

Whether you're an entrepreneur hiring your first employee, or a corporate manager filling a new post or backfilling a gap created by the departure of an existing memebr of your team, recruiting the right people is essential to growing any business. You need to know that the new person will fit in the organisation, and you need to know they'll be able to do the job. Hiring the wrong person isn't just a potentially expensive mistake: put the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time and it could kill your business completely (RIP Barings Bank!).

The problem is, most recruiters - even agents, whose job is solely to find candidates for other companies - have their focus all wrong when it comes to finding the right person. And the reason for that isn't hard to find.