the hiring mistake I made 6 times in a row (avoid this at all costs)

Hiring for your business? Here's how to choose who to hire next, and a bunch of hiring mistakes and lessons wrapped up embarassing stories (which always makes them easier to remember, don't you think?)

In this episode, I share the most cringeworthy hiring mistake I ever made, followed by another hiring mistake I made no less than 6 times (learn from me, and don't repeat it!)

You'll get an exercise to help you figure out what kind of support/team your business needs right now, and even some mindset traps to lookout for to make sure you choose someone who serves your business even better than you do. 

Whether you're hiring your very first virtual assistant or thinking about expanding your team, this episode will shift how you approach growth, hiring, and the roles that actually move the needle in your business.

We’ll talk about:

• The real first role you should hire for (hint: it's not a clone of yourself)
• Why diversity of experience matters more than matching vibes
• How to figure out where your time is actually going before you delegate
• Repeatable tasks you can get off your plate this week
• What to look for when someone has skills, but not experience
• The difference between outsourcing deliverables and building a business that runs without you

This episode is a must-listen for solopreneurs, entrepreneurs scaling up, and anyone navigating the chaotic middle of business growth.

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

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Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

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🎉 Tap here to work with Jenna inside Magic Marketing Machine (or MMM+)!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00) put this in my top five most embarrassing moments as a business owner. So I was about two years into business and I was hiring. I put a listing up on the internet and so many people applied and I had booked an entire day of... interviews of these candidates. I believe at the time I was hiring a social media writer, someone to join my team and help me create the content for my clients. I had my questions laid out and I was grading each of their answers and I was really focusing on not falling in love with the candidates because, and I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I had made a mistake hiring before where I hired someone because we were so similar and we got along and it was like, we could easily be best friends. And that's not how you want to hire. You want to hire people with diverse backgrounds. diverse lived experience, diverse skill sets, people who didn't grow up like you did, people who weren't raised like you. Otherwise, you are duplicating yourself instead of expanding the potential for your business. especially in a creative role, like as a writer, I want people who aren't like me. That's the goal. Highly capable, but not like me. So I was trying not to fall in love with these people, trying to be really like systematic, ask the question, get the answer, read the answer on my piece of paper, and then do like a round of callbacks. Is it callbacks when it's a job? I don't know. I grew up in the theater world. It's a, it's called a callback if it was an audition. Anyway, I'm auditioning all of these writers. And I get in there with this one person I asked about their like experience writing and they said, you know, not that much. Like I kind of do it for my own business, but like, yeah, not a lot. And I was like, okay, weird answer. Moving on. Okay, so. What platforms are you familiar with? Well, like we used to do Pinterest. didn't have like a huge amount of success with it. Like, okay. every answer this girl gives me, like, do you want this job? I love the honesty, but this is weird, right? I was starting to like lose my niceness because I feel like we're just wasting each other's time here. Like, did you just want to meet? I didn't say that, but I'm like, this is clearly not the job for you. Like, why did you even apply to this? she has no confidence writing. She has very little experience writing. And then we get into talking about her business and she has a highly successful online course. I think at the time, I can't remember if she had like hit half a million or a million dollars in revenue. Like it was like a really successful course. And it was at that moment that I realized I was supposed to be conducting a sales call. And this was someone who was applying to work with me to have me manage their social media, not someone applying to get the job as the writer. This was a perfect lead for my social media management services. My face is heating up just thinking about this. This was such an embarrassing moment. And the second it clicked in my head, I like tried to pivot the conversation. Spoiler alert, she did not hire me. I was the one being interviewed. my God. It was so embarrassing. It's funny though, know, thinking back to this time makes me recognize another mistake that I made in hiring and I made it again and again and over and over and over, which was, so, okay, so you're looking at your business. You're like, who should I hire first? Who should I bring in here? What's the next step to grow this thing bigger and make my life easier? because I was always up to my ear balls in... Delivery right creating the content making the content managing the accounts for my clients It seemed natural to me despite everything I had learned with all my business coaches and everything it seemed natural to me to outsource some of the work I was doing and Because I was really protective I'll say of the work that I was doing even when I outsourced it I micromanaged a bit in like Reviewing all the content before it got to the client can admit that I always wanted to review it and I wanted to check for typos and all of that and usually made a lot of changes. So even when I was outsourcing my deliverables, I was still doing a lot of work on it. But that, well, that's not even the mistake we're talking about today. It's that a few years into my business, I laid out the entire business to a like coach and they pointed out that all of the people I had hired, I had like a team of six and everyone was in one way or another delivery based. They were all delivery and I was delivery and then I was every other role in the business and there are so many other roles in a business. It is not just about delivery, especially when you're trying to grow, right? So think about all the administrative tasks. the Sales and Marketing Committee. the client onboarding and offboarding and organizing our time and the supervision of all of these people. I had built a team to help me deliver the actual product to my clients someone on graphics someone writing photographers, whatever, but I was still doing so much work. Like that was actually the easy part. The delivery was the easy part. The thing that was really taking up the most time that I needed to pass off was every other job. Now, cut to today, I have such an exceptional team that I just went on vacation for three weeks and we made like $20,000 while I was gone. Some of that might've been old payment plans, but like sales were coming in. Other people were handling the sales conversations. When someone got onboarded, all of the connections and the tech stuff was like put together by somebody else, you know, like all of these things. I still worked a little while I was on vacation, but so much of the business is being run by other highly capable people, not just the delivery. maybe you've already had some realizations listening to my story from like the team that you've built around you or some gaps that you might want to fill. Or maybe you are still working on hiring that very first person and you're still a solopreneur. I think most people listening, you're still solopreneurs, So who's the first person you should hire? Well, you have to get really real about your week and your time and where your time is going. That might involve time tracking, looking at your week and time tracking. And in order to do that and to be really realistic about where your time is going, I find you have to separate what you're stressing about with what's actually happening. Because a lot of the time we think we're busy because our brains are busy. So we think that a task is stressful or going to take a long time, but most of that time ends up being spent stressing about the task or thinking about how we're going to do the task or whatever. So we want to look at the concrete what's actually happening and where your time is going. And then as all the experts say, you want to think about three things, automate, eliminate, delegate. look at the things where all your time is going. What is a repeatable task? Repeatable tasks are going to be the first easiest thing to delegate to a virtual assistant or VA or some sort of an assistant. And they don't need to come into your business full time. They could just come a couple hours a week, what is repeatable? Do you have a clear onboarding system for when you bring in a new client? That's going to be repeatable. Maybe they need to sign a contract, fill out an onboarding form, book their first day with you. So if you're always sending out those packages yourself, that's a nice repeatable task that can go to a VA. If you spend, ⁓ you know what's a task that I always ignore that should be a VA at the end of the week, I have a task in my project management system that says, take all the receipts that came into your inbox this week and put them into the accounting folder. And I never do it. And at the end of the month or the quarter or whatever. My husband slash bookkeeper is always like, I'm missing 10 receipts from you and it keeps happening. So that's a really good repeatable task, Go into your inbox, take all of the receipts that you see and put them into a folder. get really real about those tiny tasks that are taking up time. The repeatable ones are the easiest ones to outsource a couple hours a week. So that's on delegate. Eliminate is there stuff you're doing that is not bringing in revenue and is not contributing to bringing in revenue that you can just stop doing. While you're taking a look at your week to see who you should hire next, also just like get real about if there's stuff that you can skip. And then we've got automate and hey, maybe your first hire is gonna help you look at your business and automate things. That would be great. I feel like we should also say structure. Automate, eliminate, delegate, and structure. Because a lot of the times tasks that are done willy-nilly feel like they're taking up way too much space in your brain and taking up way more time. But all you actually need is a recurring task on your calendar that says, do this thing, do this thing. So that instead of trying to remember the thing, your calendar just tells you to do the thing and it takes way less energy. Okay, so another thing to think about when you're sitting across from this person you're thinking of hiring. You want to be really clear on the skills that this person needs to have. And they don't necessarily need to have experience if they have the skill. So let me give you an example. One time I hired someone and I needed them to be able to help run Magic Marketing Machine calls. So that's like, let people in, keep people happy, moderate the chat. ⁓ We produce our calls. Magic Marketing Machine is my signature program where I help service-based business owners get clients from Instagram. And when we do our coaching calls, we really produce them. So like, we want them to be a fun experience. We want them to move quickly. We wanna make sure everyone's questions get answered and everyone feels like they got attention. That's always been ⁓ something that I value and because I grew up from a performance background and a lot of people come and work with me because I make this stuff fun and easy, so it's important to us that those calls be fun and easy. so this next person that was gonna be part of their tasks, right? And this person had never worked in online business. They'd never worked for a coach or an online business owner like me. They'd never even worked in social media, but they did work for a big Canadian TV network that hosted robust online meetings and... one of the things that they would do is say a new TV show was about to be made. It was during COVID, during the pandemic. And so they couldn't do a table read of that show. in the room together. So they started hosting the table reads on Zoom. So different people need to have the floor, there would be waiting room music, like all of these different things. And they would produce these live calls and help run the live calls. Turns out she knew how to use Zoom better than I did and like had all these cool things we could do with it to make the calls even better. that was an example of not having the right experience, but having the right skillset. That was a pretty like blatant example. Sometimes they might be a little more nuanced than that, but you want to know the main skill required to get the job done well. In terms of the person you hire being different than you, like this is what diversity, equity and inclusion is all about, right? if two people come to me and they're both equally qualified and they both have all the skills that I need and one is just like me, they grew up in a middle-class household in a white neighborhood. they've got a bit of a theater or comedy background, it doesn't behoove me to hire that person that's exactly like me. It behooves me and my business and my client base to hire someone who has a different perspective and who has had a different life experience. Like even Marissa, our program manager, is a mom of four. So even just the fact that she is different to me in that way, I'm not a mom, I don't have children, I definitely don't have four. She has some that are young, some that are like grown adult children. my goodness, just that gives her a completely different outlook on life than I have. And you know what else? She's our program manager and she's basically in charge of ⁓ client success and client happiness, making sure our clients know where they're supposed to be, when they're supposed to be, and they're happy. And she's way better at it than I am, way better at it because she has this beautiful maternal soul and she's really good at supporting people and she's really empathetic and hearing people out. And so she has that skill, she's great in that role. That's another thing about hiring, as they say. Ideally, the people you hire are going to be better at that role than you would be at that role. And that's, that's how you really know you've, you have nailed it. All right, I hope this helped. If you're hiring right now, there's my brain dump on some of the mistakes that I've made and some things to definitely look out for. This is an exciting time in business. It is always a scary move, but we have to believe that the person we're hiring is going to make up their income and more in the sales and streamlining that they bring to your business. So it's scary at first for later gain. And honestly, like, I can't emphasize enough. I just went away for three weeks and my business continued to run by itself. And I came home and said to the team, you guys are freaking amazing. I don't think I ever really believed that we would get to this point in the business where it can just do that, where I can step away and it can run smoothly. Like it's goals, it's fantastic, and it's out there for you too, if this is what you want. Okay, I love you. I'll see you in the next one.