Why You Should Hire for Happiness
Business owners get too hung up on titles when it comes to hiring.
“Who should I hire first, a VA or a social media person?” people often ask me.
The answer is neither.
Whether you’re on your first hire, your 10th hire, or your 100th hire, you should only look to hire people who would be insanely happy tackling the responsibilities you need help with.
That probably sounds like a pipe dream.
It’s not.
I talked to Vanessa Van Edwards, a behavioral scientist whose recent work has focused on happiness, about engineering happy teams. She said that through “job crafting” you can help people experience happiness every single day.
Now, in our interview, she described this process as part of reorganizing and optimizing her existing team.
But you can–and should–hire this way too.
The first step is to determine what responsibilities you need help with. Sometimes this means delegating work you’re already doing, sometimes this means assigning work that’s been going undone but could really move the needle on your business.
Next, take those responsibilities and organize them into a job description. Forget trying to assign a title to it at first. Definitely don’t assign responsibilities based on what you think a certain title or role should be doing.
Then, you can use the process Vanessa describes as job crafting to make clear who you’re looking for. Instead of just listing responsibilities, include qualifiers:
The ideal candidate would:
- Feel happy making customers feel understood and taken care of–even when we make mistakes.
- Feel masterful when it comes to spotting places we could improve our customer service procedures and creating solutions to those challenges.
- Love to craft customer-focused communication and reach out to existing customers to offer them additional opportunities
- Feel capable analyzing customer communication and surveys and provide recommendations to the leadership team.
Once you have your job description fleshed out, you can pass it around to friends. Ask them if they know people who are happy doing the things you’ve outlined–not just moderately capable.
You might be surprised at the quality of people who would respond to such a job description who would never think of themselves as a VA, marketing assistant, customers service rep, or project manager.
Of course, if you don’t find people through your friends or network, you can post about the job publicly, email your list, or advertise the job locally.
How would your life–and your team–be different if you were surrounded by people doing things they loved?
Want more on job crafting and engineering a happy team? Definitely listen to this week’s episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit. with Vanessa.
Click here to listen to the episode or read the transcript.
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