People are the Product

In a recent company meeting, our entire team completed a shortened version of the Myers Briggs test.  The purpose of the test is to make the theory of psychological types understandable and useful in people's lives.  Certain people in my life have recommended using this as an evaluation in our recruiting process, and while we haven't gone that far yet, it was interesting to see the outcome for people in our organization.   We saw team members with similar responsibilities often have similar personalities and strengths and weaknesses.

When my test was complete I ended up being ENFP, which can be summarized by the belief that people are the product.  Strengths include dealing with people and leadership and motivating teams, and weaknesses include completing more task-based things like writing blogposts…I use this test as the reason why it’s taken me so long to write this post.

Moving on to the point:  I found this interesting because after 4 years of entrepreneurship one of the most important lessons I have learned is that almost all problems within the business are resolved through recruiting.

I’m currently a member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization which is a global network of….you guessed it...entrepreneurs.  We meet and discuss priorities or challenges within our business, and most often the one on the top of the list is sales.  We then share different sales strategies that will help close more clients and more business.  Depending on your goals in business, this may not be the most scalable solution.

From my experience, the impact of a new hire is significantly greater than that of a new client.  Closing a new client may be a positive accomplishment, but hiring the right person who can do this over and over and scale sales will have a much greater impact to the business.

Our strong efforts in recruiting great people are apparent in our marketing efforts.  When I started Perfect Search I was excited to have a technology that could create sophisticated accounts and I was naive enough to think that that was all that we needed to be successful as an organization.  I quickly learned that without a great team the impact of the technology was extremely limited.

While we are working on updating our marketing materials, we plan on emphasizing how important recruiting and retention of top talent is to our and all businesses.

Have you found that top-notch recruiting is key to your business, or has something else proven to be a greater success? Comment in the section below, email us at [email protected], or tweet us @Perfect_Search!