SBA Episode #7 Best Practices for Hiring New Staff

By Evan Wedsworth

There are plenty of scary things to learn when you open a studio business, but hiring new staff might be the scariest. Whenever we host a live event for our clients we get inundated with requests to talk about how to hire staff. And it’s understandable: not only can the whole interview and onboarding process be tough, but bringing on the wrong person can be extremely costly.

We’ll probably return to this topic numerous times throughout the life of the Studio Business Accelerator, but for this edition we brought on our friend Richard Hayes, who is working on his dissertation in industrial and organizational psychology (the business of head-shrinking a business). Rick owned and managed his own studio for roughly a decade before he decided to hop into grad school, so he’s the perfect person to talk to.

For today, we’re not going to cover how to publish job openings and farm candidates, we’re going to take advantage of Rick’s area of expertise — the best practices for actually sitting down with someone in a room and trying to figure out if they’re right for your business.

“Hiring is always going to be risky. And it can be hard for us to admit to ourselves that we’re afraid and that we all have some opinions and biases that can lead us astray. That’s the first step to becoming a great interviewer — admit that you might make mistakes.”

First of all, it’s important to know just what is this job they’re applying for, anyhow. Make up a list of all the formal and informal requirements that comprise the position (or the hard and soft requirements, so-called). If you’re hiring a new instructor, the formal requirements might be things like expertise in the art (dance, martial arts, fitness, etc.), teaching experience, and punctuality. The informal requirements can be harder to define but are no less important. Your new instructor must be able to lead a room, handle interruptions gracefully, deal calmly with students or parents who are upset, be willing to pitch in and pick up slack elsewhere when needed, and so on. The hard requirements are easy to put on a resume and easy to test (“So you’ve heard of the internet, yes? Can you use it? Show me.”), but the soft requirements are much trickier. We’ll solve that problem in the interview.

For the interview, it can be tempting to turn it into a regular conversation. I’ve gone through perhaps ten interviews in my life on the employee side, and every single one basically followed the same format: tell me about yourself, where have you worked, why do you want to work here, etc. Not much different from the kind of conversation you might have with the person in the seat next to you on a plane.

Instead, come up with a structured, consistent, objective method for the interview. You can reduce the uncertainty and the influence of your own biases by following that same formula every single time. And some of your questions have to start digging at those soft requirements. Ask for examples — when did this person demonstrate the quality you’re looking for? If you know your new instructor is going to inherit a difficult class, ask them when they’ve mentored difficult students and how they would approach this new class.

Hiring is always going to be risky. We’ve talked before (episode four) about how the odds are stacked against you no matter where you live or what kind of business you run. And it can be hard for us to admit to ourselves that we’re afraid and that we all have some opinions and biases that can lead us astray. That’s the first step of becoming a great interviewer — admit that you might make mistakes. From there, you can make a plan using more objective, consistent criteria to find the best candidate.

There’s plenty more in the episode (including why it’s important to avoid the fabled “wet cheese” candidate), listen below.