How do you hire the very best employees possible? Recently, I hired an administrative assistant as a referral from a friend of mine. I took the word of my friend and this applicant when she said she knew Word and she knew computers. It turns out that she knew nothing about Macs and that’s all we use here. She could not do basic tasks like mail merge. It was crazy.
I wrecked my brain to work out how to never let that happen again. So I put together a skills test — two different tests. One is an aptitude test to determine “can they follow through on instructions”. There’s a lot of math involved. I want to know if they have the capability of figuring things out, or do they just give up? I found that a lot of candidates actually gave up and didn’t do the work. I kept telling them it’s not about the math.
The second test is a computer test. This is critical because I want to make sure that candidates know how to surf the web, use Word, Excel, and basic functions on the computer.
I had a candidate tell me, “Oh, yeah. I’m an expert at Word. I’m at expert at Excel.” I said, “Well, great. I have a test for you. I want you to prove to me that you are what you say you are, an expert at Word.” To make a long story short, she was not the expert she said she was and I saved myself a bunch of trouble.
So if you’re not doing some type of test with your employees, I highly recommend that you do. Because if you don’t, you’re going to get stuck with an employee, and that whole process will snowball and it will be hard to get rid of them.
Make sure that you’re using a vetting process and that you’re getting the very best employee out there. These two tests saved me so much agony. My new admin is rocking it out. It’s been three days, and she’s doing a great job. I can’t tell you how happy I am with having these tests to back it up.
If you don’t have a vetting process in place, I’ll be happy to send my tests to you. Email me at tom@tomjackobs.com. I’d love to chat about how I can help customize it for your business. Connect with me on Facebook, tom.jackobs. Until next time, have a great week.
