The Finance Leader Podcast
The Finance Leader Podcast
045: Recruiting and Hiring Team Members
Since you will have to train and work with new people, how are you shaping and influencing the process? Are you working with HR to find the best candidates? Also, do you really know what the best candidate is who will fit well with your team? The old ways to hire Finance and Accounting team members must be relooked so we get the best candidates who can lead and influence positive outcomes.
I will highlight the following topics:
- What is your ideal candidate?
- How does team culture determine the best candidate?
- Be proactive with HR,
- Do something different in the interview,
- Improve your selection process.
You can download the Leadership Growth Blueprint for Finance and Accounting Managers here. You can use this guide to develop your leadership by focusing on communication, and growing and empowering your team.
For more resources, please visit stephenmclain.com.
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This week I am talking about recruiting and hiring new team members. So you'll have to train and work with you. How are you shaping that pencil in the process? Are you working with HR to find the best candidates? Also, do you really know what the best candidate is? Who will fit well with your team? The old ways to hire finance and accounting team members must be relooked so we get the best candidates who can lead and influence positive outcomes. Please enjoy the episode. Welcome to the finance leader podcast where leadership is bigger than the numbers. I am your host Stephen McLain. This is the podcast for developing leaders in finance and accounting. This is episode number 45. And now we'll be talking about recruiting and hiring new team members. And I will highlight the following topics. Number one, what is your ideal candidate? Number two, how does team culture determine the best candidate? Number three, be proactive with HR. Number four, do something different in the interview. And number five, improve your selection process. businessman and motivational speaker Peter Schutz said higher character trained skill. This is the debut of season six, we are going to address topics around shaping and developing your team. We will talk about recruiting and hiring team members, team culture, setting expectations, coaching, performance reviews, and many more. This is about using your leadership to shape how your team will perform its mission in the future. I started this podcast because I wanted to focus on building and developing leadership skills for finance and accounting professionals. I know that we are already expected to be technical experts in the field. But it would be your leadership ability that can set you apart from your peers, its leadership and how you influence the execution of the strategy, which will help you advance. Now why is leadership important? When you grow your leadership, you start to focus both yourself and your team in the right direction. Your productivity becomes better your team members grow, and you get to shift your effort to where it should be. In episode two of this podcast, I talked about four key responsibilities that finance and accounting leaders have, number one, influencing positive ideas. Number two, developing your team members. Number three achieving results. And number four seeing the future. If you focus your effort in these four areas, you will set yourself apart. senior leaders will begin to notice this week I am talking about recruiting and hiring new team members. Since you have a vested interest and have to live with hiring decisions. You must be deeply involved in the recruitment pipeline into your organization. To find candidates who fit your culture and vision managers tend to hire for hard technical skills and finance and accounting. And then realize this person can't get along with anyone and can't support what you are trying to accomplish. We tend to lean toward high Excel skills and forget about critical soft skills like communication, time management, and strategic insight. The candidate pipeline is critical, you must expand the pipeline see you get a chance at the best candidates. The best teams have a balance of personalities have a strong sense of hard and soft skills and are diverse. To get this the pipeline needs to be wide and plentiful with candidates. A narrow pipeline gives you the same limited and tired choices. And this may be why your team is struggling to execute the strategy. My ideal candidates are those who go beyond the spreadsheet. I know I have high expectations especially when the traditional accounting and finance population likes their spreadsheets and tend to lean towards working alone. Instead of reaching out to others when trying to solve a complex problem. I am looking for leaders who want to partner around the organization. I know I'm asking a lot. I can hear your objections and reasons why you won't get the people I am describing. If you can find one or two of these ideal candidates, then we may be able to declare victory and move on. What we don't want is the classic highly skilled Excel user who appears great from a skills perspective, but doesn't really fit your culture. I want those who can find critical insights in the numbers. Who can bring to light issues. No one Analysis seeing, I'll take that over beautifully formatted spreadsheets any day, I believe in analytical and soft skills, instead of only spreadsheet building skills. Now, I need to ask you a very critical question. Why would someone want to work for your company? People are alert to jobs for a variety of reasons. It could be the money, for the experience, it could be for benefits. Maybe it's a short commute, or there's a working remote option. People also want to be treated right? Does your company have a reputation for growing their people? do their ideas matter? What are people saying about your organization? Does your company culture speak of fairness and opportunity? Or is it a top driven philosophy where people just work with no input to decisions, the reputation of the company matters when it comes to available candidates. So please look really deeply at the reputation of your organization, as it will affect who will apply? Now let's talk about how you can influence the recruiting and hiring process the number one, what is your ideal candidate, you must clearly define what you are looking for. So you have the best chance at hiring someone who will fit in what is the most important to you and the company? He has to know clearly who you are, and who you want to work with? Do you like developing people? Or do you want them coming in ready to perform at a certain level? A candidate can be evaluated for hard skills, personality, mindset, approach to adversity, level of narcissism, leadership, ability to influence and many other soft skills? Do you want a self starter? Or someone who's gonna wait on instructions every time? Are they coachable? Are they open to getting better? Or do they feel they are already highly skilled? Are they team oriented? Or are they selfish? And again, it's a soft versus hard skills issue. My ideal candidate is very strong and selective soft skills. Because these are much harder to train and teach. Soft Skills depend much on personality and mindset. I do understand that hiring someone who will work with numbers must have an understanding of what to do. Otherwise, you could have disaster. I want people who go beyond their spreadsheets, you can have a positive impact on the strategy with insights and who wants to solve problems. And yes, these may be rare people. But I also want to develop my people into these ideals. And number two, how does team culture determine the best fit, you need a team who can work together, your team culture is determined by the values, attitudes and beliefs on the team. We will talk more about team culture next week. Everyone influences the team's culture. If you hire wrong, you can ruin the culture you want. You could hire a disruptive person that could shift the culture in the wrong direction. You set the tone for culture as the leader, but anyone on the team can influence it. So be careful to ensure you're hiring the best into the culture that you want. Don't overlook this critical aspect of team dynamics and team development. Number three, I want you to be proactive with HR, you must work with HR in order to influence the hiring process. You must own the job descriptions for your team, which is often the case anyway. And I also suggest that salary ranges are published with job announcements, not a popular course of action. But I believe it's time to do this for every position out there and ensure they expand the candidate pipeline. If you get 10 candidates to apply, you might get one who fit. But if you get 100. To apply, you might get five to 10, who have a chance at fitting to get the best possible field of candidates, you have to look at many different sources of people, not just one or two, as many as possible. Expanding the pipeline is critical to fielding the best team possible. You have to be proactive with HR, if you want to shape the outcome of your candidate search. Now, number four, you need to do something different in the interview. Don't just focus on Excel skills. These are important but not the be all end all to finding the best candidates. Excel skills does not equal leadership skills. I want people who have the potential for leadership to be on my team. And maybe that's an anomaly. But I want you to examine that possibility always. Now let's look at also soft skills. And when did they overcome adversity and how have they influence a decision that was positive for the company? Can they prioritize? Can they say no to lower priority requirements. You also need to know their personality and how they enter interact with others, can they work with other people to solve a problem? A common practice is to allow team members to interview candidates. Also, this is a good opportunity to test a team culture fit. Your present members can get a good feel for fit and potential. And I also want you to ask about purpose, adversity, try to bring out whether they can be coachable, this is important. Do you want someone who will take direction and also coaching and how to improve. So do something different in your interview, other than just asking how to do certain Excel skills or how to build formulas, or how to build a table, go beyond the spreadsheet. Number five, you need to improve your selection process. To aid in your selection. Try to determine what wasn't said. In addition to what was said this is important. What wasn't said helps to determine what was missing, analyze and compare. Then score candidates according to what is important. And give more weight to that is a team culture, soft skills, leadership potential hard skills, and then make your choice based on what your ideal candidate is. For the position you're filling. Again, you may be filling many positions over the time they were leading a team, you have to make the analysis on what you need for that position at the time, and that ideal candidate may change. So your selection criteria may also change. For each position you're filling in it depends on what you already have on the team. It already depends on the personalities you have, and the combination of mindset and skills and how to solve problems. So you make sure you have a well balanced team moving forward. Now for an easy one. Today, I want you to work on two areas. Number one, define your ideal candidate so you know what you're looking for. The ideal candidate may be different each time you're looking to fill a position. So before you asked to hire, make sure you know what you need on the team number to reach out to HR so you can partner with them on your needs. If you don't, then you are letting them decide your needs and what will fit. Work with them so you shape the outcome. To build the team you want. You must plan and also work with HR. To ensure you have a better chance of success, you must take action. You must be intentional in this process. Otherwise, you are letting others decide for you. And you will have to live with those consequences. I have a free guide for you. It's called the leadership growth blueprint for finance and accounting managers. In the guide I talked about three leadership areas communication, team growth, and empowerment. Plus a few recommendations around challenges with the systems you are probably using to complete your work. The link to the guide is in the episode description. Or you can go to Stephen McLain calm. Please use it to help you with a few leadership wins today. Thank you. This episode is sponsored by my course through finance leader Academy. It's called advance your finance and accounting career developing a promotion strategy that will set you apart to advance your career. You must set yourself apart from your peers, finance and accounting professionals are already expected to be technically competent. This course helps you establish your professional Foundation, and how you can set yourself apart from your peers. by growing your leadership skills and developing your executive presence. You can go to Stephen mclain.com. For more details on this career advancement course. The link is also in the show notes with this episode. Thank you. The most important takeaways from this episode are to ensure you're working with HR on the process and work to expand the pipeline of candidates. Additionally, focus on soft skills versus technical skills. keep your mind open to incredible candidates who might get overlooked because of a lack of traditional hard skills. You want someone who knows more than just the Excel keyboard shortcuts. Next week, I will discuss team culture, which has huge implications on how successful your team can be. I hope you enjoyed the finance leader Podcast. I am dedicated to helping you grow your leadership because it is leadership that will set you apart from your peers. You can get this episode wherever you find podcasts. Until next time, you can check out more resources stephen.com and sign up for my updates so you don't miss an episode of the show. And now go lead your team and I'll see you next time. Thank you
