How To Hire Good Employees Who Will Accelerate Growth

Hiring a team of superstars is an under-the-hood source of competitive advantage for small business owners. “The smaller you are, [the more you] need A players,” says Ryan Babenzien, the successful serial entrepreneur behind sneaker brand Greats and filtered showerhead company Jolie. 

“If you’re a 10-person company, all 10 people need to be exceptional. You’re going to give yourselves an outsized advantage if they are. If you have five exceptional people and five not-so-exceptional people, that’s going to limit your ability to be amazing and limit what you are as a business.” 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to run a hiring process that attracts good employees and get expert tips for hiring the right person for your company. 

How to hire good employees in 7 steps

In order to attract and hire great people, you need a well-defined employee recruitment process. Whether you’re hiring your first employee or your 100th, follow these seven foundational steps:

1. Scope the role. Outline the core responsibilities for the role and the key skills and experience someone would need to be successful. Think through what their day-to-day work will be and what business outcomes you want them to contribute to.

2. Write a job description. Include a summary of the job responsibilities, key skills and experience, information about the company, and details about compensation and benefits. Some states require you to post salary ranges—check with your state department of labor (DOL). 

3. Source candidates. Advertise your open position by adding it to your website, sharing it on social media, and posting it to job websites like LinkedIn and Indeed. You can also share job postings with your network and request referrals. 

4. Screen candidates. As you start receiving résumés, review each one for qualifications and experience. Set up an initial phone screen (a quick 15- to 30-minute call) with the most promising potential candidates before conducting interviews. 

5. Interview top candidates. Interviews may be structured as multiple rounds, including meetings with other team members. Assess potential hires’ hard skills as well as intangibles like values alignment and willingness to learn.

6. Do your due diligence. Once you have a preferred candidate, contact their references to corroborate details of their past employment and quality of work. Some companies also choose to do background checks as part of the interview process; check with your state’s DOL and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for more information on legal requirements for background checks.

7. Extend an offer. The offer letter should specify salary and pay frequency, plus equity and benefits like health insurance and a 401(k), if available. Also indicate the time off policies available to new employees, including vacation time off and sick leave.

5 Tips for hiring the best employees

• Be opportunistic
• Tap your most successful employees
• Interview for intangibles first
• Seek mission alignment
• Develop a good employer brand

Finding and retaining great employees can be challenging, especially in a highly competitive labor market. Here are some tips to make your recruiting process as successful as possible: 

Be opportunistic

Rather than hire employees to fill existing roles, create roles for top talent. Ryan, cofounder of filtered showerhead brand Jolie, advocates for this opportunistic approach. 

“If somebody said, ‘You’ve got to meet [so-and-so]. He’s great,’ and I’m not looking for a role, and I’m so blown away by you that I think: I need to figure out a way to get you into this company when a role opens up. Maybe you’re so exceptional, we’re going to figure out a role to create for you, because I need to hire you. That’s how I like to operate,” Ryan says. 

This was exactly the approach he took with the company’s head of pro channel sales. Ryan knew he would eventually need to hire someone to manage Jolie’s sales pipeline to professional hair salons, but he hadn’t formally opened the role. When he met the ideal candidate, Ryan moved quickly.

“We had met this woman who was working at another company, and the meeting was about her company and us, and working with us,” he says. “Within 30 minutes of the meeting, I thought, ‘This person has such a perfect pedigree.’ We weren't hiring for the role yet, but I thought if we ever did, this is exactly the person [we would hire]. So in the middle of the meeting, as she’s pitching some other thing, I said, ‘Hey, are you happy where you are? Do you like the company you’re working at right now?’ She said, ‘Well, I could be convinced.’ We hired her two weeks later.”

Ryan credits that opportunistic hire with developing the professional sales channel into a successful business arm. “[Hiring her] was the best decision we ever made in that space—now that’s a real business. We would have not been able to do that without her.”

Tap your most successful employees

Your existing employees can be your best sources of referrals. Ricardo Larroudé, cofounder of footwear brand Larroudé, leans on his most successful employees to support the recruiting process. “I sit down [with them] and say, listen, ‘You’re great, but if you’re only yourself, you’re useless to me. You’ve got to find five people like you,” he says on an episode of Shopify Masters.

Some companies also choose to offer employees referral incentives. For example, you might offer a cash bonus to any employee who refers a candidate who is hired and remains at the company for at least one year. 

Interview for intangibles first

Assessing hard skills is a standard part of any interview, but Toral Patel, senior VP of marketing and ecommerce at Kopari Beauty, sees soft skills like willingness and ability to learn as critical predictors of future performance in a small startup environment. 

“We’re always faced with new problems,” Toral says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “We can’t predict what will happen. You really have to be able to stay nimble, be agile, and be open to learning new things very quickly. Not everyone is comfortable with that.”

Toral also emphasizes the value of a team-focused mindset, especially in a remote work environment. “It’s hard to be collaborative sometimes when we are all working remotely,” she says. “A positive attitude and being a team player [are] extremely important.” 

Ricardo from Larroudé looks for three non-negotiable traits when hiring: willingness to admit when they don’t know something, ability to deal with a crisis, and strong ethics. “If you have those three, that’s perfect,” Ricardo says. “If you have one of the three missing, usually it’s a bad thing. But for sure the one that you shouldn’t miss is the ethical one, because you’re going to get robbed if that happens.”

Seek mission alignment

For Thomas Hal Robson-Kanu, founder and CEO of The Turmeric Co., alignment with the company mission and vision is the most important thing in a candidate. “You don’t actually build your team based on who’s the best digital marketer or who’s the best supply chain manager. It’s actually who’s most aligned with our core values,” he says on Shopify Masters. 

Thomas dealt with chronic pain and inflammation as a teenager before becoming a pro athlete, and sees promoting functional medicine as key to The Turmeric Co.’s mission and company culture. “When you have a vision, it helps filter and funnel the right people into the organization,” he says.

“If your vision’s too big, it might scare people,” Thomas says. “A lot of people will say, ‘Actually, that sounds like a lot of work.’” But “if someone’s really aligned with it, they’ll be like, ‘Yes, this is what I want. Let’s do it.’” 

Develop a good employer brand

Research from LinkedIn shows that companies known for delivering a good work experience are more likely to hire good employees. Companies that employees rate highly for flexible work arrangements and opportunities to learn new, in-demand skills are 9% more likely to hire good employees. Companies rated highly for offering opportunities to work on innovative projects were 11% more likely to hire good employees. 

These numbers underscore the importance of delivering on the aspects of work that employees care about—and making sure that your track record as an employer is visible to future candidates, in the form of solid employer branding. Encourage employees to leave positive (but authentic) reviews on websites like Indeed and Glassdoor.