You have decided that you need to hire someone. Depending on the size and structure of your business, there may be several “next steps”. If you are a hiring manager in a mid-size or larger company, you may have to get a budget variance, convince upper management of the need, and maybe even write the job description (and get approval for that, too). If you are the owner of a small business, it may just be a matter of putting the job posting together.

No matter how many intermediate steps there are for your particular situation, eventually you come to the point of trying to define who you are looking for.

What qualities and skills does this person need to have?

In order to answer that question, you need to think about the things this person is going to have to do in his day-to-day role. Take a moment to imagine the activities and the interactions that will be happening. From that view of successful interactions, work backwards to discover the skills, the aptitudes, and the attitudes required. (For more on attitudes see Do you want someone with an attitude.)

For instance, someone to greet customers as they enter the store and to ring them up on a touch-screen cash register will result in a very different set of requirements than for someone to program the register. In the first case, you might be expecting a friendly, outgoing person. Limited technical abilities are acceptable since the touch-screen register will walk them through the process every time. Since it is a cash register and handling money, a higher attention to detail may be required than someone who unloads boxes from trucks or greets people and helps them find their way around the store.

Dealing with the public may dictate a certain attention to personal appearance (depends on the store-Nordstrom’s or Neiman-Marcus implies a different look and attire than Mad Dog’s Dungeon-Clothing and Accessories for Goths.)

In the case of the programmer, you would expect him to be familiar with computers of all sorts; able to type; knowledgeable about the specifics of your computer hardware and operating system; able to communicate well enough that you and he will be able to discuss what you want and how it should work; and probably several more things. Attention to detail will be important, but personal fashion tastes may not be.

Now that you have an idea of what attributes will make a person successful in the job, you can begin to work towards the job description and the job posting. I know. Many of you just flinched when I said job description. Don’t worry. Unless your company requires a formal job description, you don’t have to do that. But it really is a good idea to have some notes (at least) on what you will be expecting from this person. Those notes will help in two ways.

When you have actually hired the person, the notes will help you stay on track as you evaluate them over the year. But they have a more immediate purpose.

Those notes let you get the skills and qualities you want out of your head and on paper. That frees up your mind to think of other things without worrying about remembering it all (and possibly overlooking or forgetting something when you need it.) Once you have them down and review the list you will possibly think of more. Go ahead, write them down, too. Now review what you have written.

Using whatever system works for you-separate sheet of paper, numbers and symbols, colored sticky dots, or your own special system-separate them into must-haves, nice-to-haves, and absolutely-cannot-haves. (These last usually occur to you somewhere in the process and it is useful to have them noted somewhere. We will be using these as we craft the interview questions.)

Transfer these to a fresh sheet of paper with separate sections for each group above (must-haves, etc.). Review what you have with the question-if someone showed up with the must-haves (and nothing else), would I hire them? If the answer is no, then you have more to add to the must-haves. Keep doing that until you have a set of qualities, skills, and abilities that you can live with. Congratulations! You have just determined your minimum requirements. Almost.

Before you can say you have the minimum requirements, turn the question around and ask if a candidate showed up missing any one of those must-haves, but also has one of the nice-to-haves, would you still hire him? If the answer is yes, then one (or more) of those must-haves is really a nice-to-have. Adjust your list accordingly.

Now do a similar process on the nice-to-haves. The difference is that here you are asking if one of these is really a must-have. After you have determined that, then try to prioritize them from most-important nice-to-haves to least important. Since hiring is always a series of trade-offs (I have never met the ideal candidate), this will help you later when evaluating the candidates.

And what about the cannot-haves? Don’t lose the list. It may be just a silent checklist you use as you craft the interview questions or conduct the interview. Sometimes it will be stated explicitly in the job posting (”no visible tattoos” might be one if the position is dealing with certain segments of the population). Just be sure that you don’t run afoul of discrimination laws with your cannot-haves. Remember, too, that you can often craft these cannot-haves in positive language that accomplishes you goal without sounding or being negative.

Now you have the basis for a job posting. (We’ll talk about that in another article.) You also have a much clearer idea of who you are looking for and can, maybe, recognize him when he walks in the door.

So now we have covered some aspects of figuring out who we are looking for. And it is a good start. But, there’s more. Now, let's cover a couple of other things we need to nail down before we issue the job posting.

Alright, we have a list of desired qualities and skills that we want the candidate to have. And we have refined the list and prioritized what we want.

Is a certain education or are special certifications required? Are they on the list?

Did you remember to take personalities and team dynamics into account? Remember, the smaller the team, the more important team dynamics becomes.

Have you avoided trying to hire yourself? (We asked if you would work for you, but that is different from hiring yourself. This is the flip side.) Most managers tend to hire themselves. After all, who could do a better job than you, right? So it makes sense to find someone just like you (you would clone yourself, if you could.) Of course, unless you are planning to retire and are planning to hand over the business (and it’s success or failure) to the employee, you don’t need another you. You need someone to do the specific job that you can’t do (either because you don’t have the time, the skills, the knowledge or another similar reason.) Hire for the job to be done.

Also, consider whether the market will support what you are planning to pay-both at the upper end and the lower end. If your expectations for pay scale and the market’s are very mismatched, you will be frustrated, disappointed, or both.

I knew of one leader (he was the head of a non-profit organization) that didn’t believe that office administrative people should make more than $8.00 an hour. In his view, paying $10/per hour was pretty high-priced for the office manager. (He was on salary and making the equivalent of $58/hour with more benefits and perks than anybody.) He actually got better quality than he deserved because some of the employees believed in the cause and were willing to take lower pay (they also had spouses who provided more income allowing them to take lower pay and still work for something they believed in.) He also lost really good people to better-paying jobs.

In the end, you get what you pay for, so make sure that your pay scale and your expectations are congruent with the market. You will be much happier in the long run.

Now that you have these refinements in place, you are just about ready to post the job and start interviewing the flood of candidates that will undoubtedly respond to your masterful and irresistible job ad.

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