One of the questions that I’ve got this past week was, “How do you hire skilled employees?” I’ll explain by using my fitness business as an example. For fitness trainers at my business, I don’t hire certified trainers. I want to train them up myself.
I’ll run an ad and say I will train you to become a personal trainer if you have a passion for helping other people. I want people that are passionate about helping other people because those of you who are in the fitness industry know that starting out is a little rough. I want to protect my current clients and make sure that I have the very best people working with us, and I want to make sure that I’m empowering the employees to do the right thing and be really part of the team.
Then we do a group interview because we want people who are able to talk in front of others. I watch the people that are listening to the presenter because I want to see their reaction to that person. Are they the type of person that’s engaged with what’s happening, or they looking at their phone?
Then we will bring them in for a six to eight week unpaid internship program We have weekly lesson plans centered around customer service, as well as kinesiology, biomechanics, how to train, and do everything that we do as personal trainers. By the end of that six to eight weeks, they should be able to get a certification without any problem what so ever.
That has worked extremely well for me because now we have a very consistent way of training. Personalities are going to be a little bit different but the training style is going to be very similar because we train everybody in the same way.
I hope this was helpful in terms of how to train higher level employees. Bring them in as interns. I love this model because you get six to eight weeks to interview. We’ll typically bring two or three people on with the hopes of one person sticking through the program because it is a long-term process. Then we can really tell who’s a good fit and who’s not. With an hour interview, if you even have an hour interview, it’s hard to determine if they’re going to be a good fit. I highly recommend that you do this internship program.
If you need help determining how to do that for different levels of the organization, shoot me an email tom@tomjackobs.com. Connect with me on Facebook or Twitter. I’d love to connect with you and see how you’re doing in your business and see if I can help you out in any way.
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mASoOqLaxEU&feature=youtu.be
