The interview process is rife with problems, and the solopreneur consultant has more problems than most at the beginning.
Think about it: If you’ve solved the problem of scaling up from a freelance, “I hire myself because it’s cheaper,” mindset, and have developed a proprietary process that you can sell to others at a price high enough to justify having an employee, only then can you make a hire.
And many solopreneurs/business owners, approach hiring with a mindset grounded in the back end UX they suffered through when they were looking to work for somebody else.
Typically the process goes as follows: You bring people into a room, after putting several of them through a grueling process of assessment—both psychological and sometimes physical. Then you ask them a series of ridiculous, HR designed, pre-formatted questions.
After this, everybody leaves the room and the consultant/solopreneur/business owner makes a blind decision to hire or not hire the people put through the process. This decision typically follows a series of arbitrary, meaningless, showy conversations with partners and others, that have told nothing about how well the potential employee can perform in the position; and, have everything to do with intangible–and potentially illegal to consider–character traits.
This is the interview process and a lot of times both the interviewer and the newly hired individual is dissatisfied with what happened in the room.
Look, if you’ve successfully leapfrogged to business owner from freelancer, then there are three things that you should be looking for before you even think about going down the hackneyed road of interviewing:
- Is the person that I am talking to conscientious?
- Is the person that I am talking to accustomed to failure and does this person have the grit to get through it?
- Is the person that I’m talking to going to fulfill the material needs of my business at a human level?
That’s it. Those are your interview considerations.
Now, you’re an entrepreneur first and a business owner second. Go blow up the model of the process.
-Peace Be With You All-
Jesan Sorrells, MA
Principal Conflict Engagement Consultant
Human Services Consulting and Training (HSCT)
Email HSCT: hsconsultingandtraining@gmail.com
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