Before You Make the Hire

You’ve got a candidate you’re excited about. It feels like a win—and you’re ready to make the offer.

Pause.

This is when a lot of owners rush, because they’re tired of the process and want it done. And it’s exactly when one missed step can cost you months of cleanup later.

In this episode, I share a real example where the red flags showed up early, were brushed off, and then showed up again after the hire. It reinforced a simple truth: resumes can say anything, but patterns don’t lie.

You’ll learn a few quick checks to run before you make the offer—no complicated systems—just clear thinking that protects your time, money, and sanity.

Resources:

• Want to increase your profitability? Grab my book “The Profit Bleed.“
• Looking to grow your construction business? Check out our exclusive group "The Contractors Collective.”
• Want employees to take more ownership? Check out our course - “Build Your Dream Team.”
• Are you struggling to hire the right people? Check out our “Contractors Hiring Blueprint” course.

Connect with Vicki on social media:

• YouTube: Vicki Suiter
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vickisuiter
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuiterBusinessBuilders

If you love listening to this podcast, please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.

Transcript

Hi, welcome to another episode of the Profit Builder.

This is the last of a series of six videos that I've done that's all about how do you hire the right person for the job. And in the first few videos, I talked about how do you be clear about what's the right position to first hire for? And then what are the skills and qualifications somebody has to have in order to do that job well for you? How do you get super clear about what that is?

And in the third video, I talked about how do you not waste time interviewing the wrong person and have a good screening process in place. And then the next video, I talked about how do you have a good interview process and good set of practices around interviewing candidates so that when you're finished interviewing, you're really clear about whether or not that person's a right fit for the job in your company.

And in that video, we also talked about the fact that a lot of times positions in one company or another can have the same title but have completely different responsibilities. And the importance of having a good screening process in the interview process, a good set of questions and how critical that is. Next video that I did, the fifth one was about how do you evaluate candidates one against the other and how to have a process around that. And I shared with you an example of that.

In this video, I want to just talk about, all right, so you've decided that you're going to hire that person. Do you just hire them or do you check references? The thing that understand is that, and we all can appreciate this, people can put anything on a piece of paper, on a resume or an application. But the question is, does that person actually have the experience and the knowledge and the background and the that they say that they do and have they told the truth about those things. And that's why you want to check references. And I'm going to say specifically in all of your senior positions, if this person is a manager, you absolutely should check references. If this is a position where you require somebody to have a degree, you absolutely should check references. You should check their education.

You should, if there's somebody in your finance department, you should check, do a background check. So let me just talk about each one of those different kind of checks or reference checks individually. So when we're talking about doing, let's talk about reference checks. So a lot of times it's a good idea and you'll find if you've ever worked with a headhunter, they will always ask people to give them at least three references. You want a reference for somebody who they have worked for in the past and that you can like go look them up on LinkedIn and see if that person's actually ever worked for that company. And ideally someone who they had to report to. It could be a coworker or another project, know, another person who did that job before. Then you wanna also maybe ask for references. Like if it was a controller, a CPA might be a good reference to let you get a sense of you know, what kind of shape the books got reported in when, you know, it went to the CPA for taxes, that kind of stuff. 

So get at least three references and call those references and have some questions that you're going to ask them ahead of time before you do that. You have to understand, and we all know this, like there's a certain limitation to what you can ask people, but what you're trying to identify in that process of talking to references is to get a sense of somebody's practices, their rigor, their discipline, their character, you know, did they like how did how did they do it by delivering, you know, following through on promises and agreements, you know, what was your relationship with them? What you know, what's the good news and the bad news about them? We all have good news and bad news about us, right? It's very interesting the things that people will tell you and references will tell you when you ask that question.

I had a controller once who, the owner called its previous employer and the reference said, when he said what was the good news and the bad news, he said, well, she has a tendency to show up late a lot of times and she always has an excuse about it. She does great work, but she's kind of like, she's a little unreliable in that way. And he kind of skimmed over it.

And sure enough, that behavior showed up in her next job. you wanna like, it'll reveal something about people's character and about their habits. So it's a good practice. So first of all, checking references, I recommend three. Background, checking employment. And I'll talk about background checks in a second, but checking employment, previous employment. Check if they ever actually worked at those jobs. Now an employer can only give you higher, and end date, start date, end date. And I don't even think they can do, I don't think they can even do salary range anymore. I think that got eliminated a couple of years ago, maybe not in every state. So you'll have to kind of check with the regulations in your state, but you do wanna find out, did they actually work there before? Anybody can make that phone call, right? It doesn't have to be you, the manager, owner of the company, but you could have anyone call and check those.

The third thing is that you want to do a background check if it's somebody who has any kind of fiduciary responsibility in your company. In other words, they have some control over your money and your finances. In that case, you want to do a credit check, you want to do a criminal background check, and you want to do an education check, again, depending on the level of the position. My experience has told me that whenever that hasn't happened or we couldn't get good information around somebody. I've seen companies get embezzled from people who lied about those things and then had a story around them and the owner ignored it. And then that person stole from them. it's, you you can have somebody who's like all like every, all the boxes get checked, you know, that they're really a right candidate. I, the taking this extra little step here can really help you in making sure that you're not putting your company in a vulnerable position with the wrong person. Now, in terms of background checks, even reference checks, but also like background checks and what have you, like credit checks, headhunters a lot of times will have services that will do that for you, that you can just have a headhunter do it for you and they'll run that check for you. There's actually online services that will do it, but they won't necessarily do reference checks, but they will do background checks. So those are just some ways that you can do that.

Again, before you hire somebody, last step, you wanna make sure that you do reference checks, do background, know, prior employment checks, do background checks if there's somebody who's responsible for the finances in your business. You will be grateful that you did. You're gonna find that that's sort of the last piece of turning the key called, okay, this was a good hire for me because we all know that bad hires are super expensive.