Hello and welcome to another episode of always up to date. I’m Denise and this is [inaudible] and we are co owners of always Edmonton Bookkeeping a. So today we’re going to be talking about hiring status strategies. Uh, for those of you that are new to our channel, uh, you’ll see that we always start our videos with a quote and a statistic. Uh, so our quote today is from Jim Collins, who is the author of six different books. Uh, and his quote is letting the wrong people hang around us. Is it unfair to all the right people as they inevitably find themselves? Con compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people? Worse it can drive away the best people, strong performers that are intrinsically motivated by performance. And when they see, see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated. Uh, so the statistic today is from CD insights and they reviewed essays from failed entrepreneurs and it said that most of the entrepreneurs listed multiple reasons for failure.
42% of entrepreneur preneurs who failed, reported no market for their services or product is one of the reasons for failure. 29% of entrepreneurs who failed, reported running out of cash is one of the reasons for failure. And 23% of entrepreneurs who failed, reported not having the right team as one of the reasons for failure. These were the three most common reasons, reported. All of the other reasons report reported less frequently, such as pricing, cost, timing, location, et cetera. Um, so you’re a small business owner and things are starting to grow, your company is growing and um, you’ve hired a couple of employees and things seem to be going really good and one day you come into the office and um, your one of your employees gives their two weeks notice and you think, ah, now on top of all of the things you’ve gotta do, you’ve gotta hire somebody new and, uh, y’all way, both you and I have gone through the hiring process and, um, we’ve kind of come up with a, a new way of hiring with Edmonton Bookkeeping.
Um, and so we’re going to just talk about this, this hiring strategy that we have. Can you, so, um, before we start off, you have some questions that we’re going to try to answer all, all throughout the video. The first one is what is the difference between a conventional interview and a group interview? Yeah, good question. So, um, most people know what a conventional interview is. Just, you know, you put it out there and maybe you put your ad on indeed or um, wherever you might put it out. You hear somebody through word of mouth, you have friends, whatever. Um, and so you book a bunch of time off to, to meet these people. You read all the resumes that have come in, you maybe do a phone screening, um, give them a call. Um, talk to them, bring them in to interview them, do the interview for a couple of hours with Edmonton Bookkeeping, maybe an hour.
I don’t know how long an interview goes for, but maybe a couple hours is a long time, but you still have to schedule that time and inevitably people don’t show up. So you’ve wasted all this time. You’re waiting. Um, where a group interview, you can see as many people as you want. At one time, as many people show up, you get to see them. It cuts down on the time of having to find people. Um, one of the biggest advantages is that you can see so many more people with a group interview and that’s how you’re gonna find your, your 18, your, you know, the people that are gonna fit into your company that are going to help you. That’s gonna kind of separate the people that are just kind of a little, you know, they’ll do, cause we need somebody and the people that are like, okay, this is the person that I want on my team.
And it’s very important I believe for small businesses because, uh, we only have so much time and usually the, the owners are the only ones that are doing the hiring process. They don’t really have to each HR component just yet separated from all their departments. So just cutting down on time is the big, big, big advantage of how you interview. So how many people should you interview before hiring somebody? Yeah, it seems crazy, but you should hire a hundred people before you interview or before you hire somebody. And sometimes that can be daunting. Like how do you see a hundred people? That’s um, that’s just crazy. Yeah. So how do you fit seeing so many people into your schedule? Yeah, so that’s what’s so good about the group interview. Um, you know, send out a, uh, a job posting, have that job posting, running, um, set up a time in your schedule for group interviews and just when somebody sends you a, um, a reply to the posting, then what we do is we just send out a, um, standard email that uses Edmonton Bookkeeping.
It’s just the basic email. Say this is what our group interviews are. These, we have, um, have them like calendar Dan for the next year. These are when we’re having our group interviews. This is what time it’s at, come to the group interview. So sometimes we have three or four people show up. I think one time even had just one person, but we’ve also had 20 people show up for the group interview. So that’s how you can see that many people. You see them all at the same time, which is a bit of an advantage as well because then you can kind of compare, um, you know, you, after you’ve seen eight people for like a whole week of interview time and um, you kind of forget your first one when you, you know, you saw somebody on Monday and by Friday forgotten what the first one was, what you liked about them or how do they compare to the one that you saw on Friday, like between the two, which would be a better fit where if you have them all in the room at the same time, you, you can see them right there and you can, um, you know, kind of compare and you can totally see that they now make a, especially in a group setting for the people that are playing to your, um, to your company.
Also, it cuts down on the questions that are becoming repetitive when you’re doing the interview. In a conventional interview, we normally have a set of questions that we ask any most of them, they’re pretty repetitive. The answers are pretty repetitive. So in a group interview when people are um, answering questions, um, they will have to think of something else from the other person to be able to send out. So I think that’s one of the advantages as well in having a group interview. Yeah, that’s great with Edmonton Bookkeeping.
How do you read all the resumes? Yeah, so we actually don’t read all the resumes. We um, people send their resumes that we ask them to send their resume and we have some questions that we send to them and we asked for a cover letter. They bring them to the interview. We only read the resumes of the people we’re interested in with conventional. Um, you have to, you have to read them all to see who you want to bring in, where with a group interview they all come in. If they don’t stand out to us, then we don’t bother reading their [inaudible] their resume because we know we’re not going to hire them. So what’s the point? It doesn’t matter what’s on their resume. Yeah, absolutely. And again, people lie on their resume too much on the resume. It’s better to see the person per a first spend time with them and then read the resume.
That’s great. Um, what are you saying in your interview? Yeah. So, um, you know, an interview is a good time for the people that are being interviewed to find out about your company as well. So, um, in our group interviews we share our values. Um, first we actually read the posting over again of what the job is about. Cause these people have been applying for so many jobs and especially in the Alberta economy, people are applying for so many jobs. And so sometimes they come to the interview when they forget about Edmonton Bookkeeping. Um, I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody walk out cause they were at the wrong interview, but we just want to make sure that this is what they’re actually applying for. Um, and then the, we, um, sort of read our values so that they know what we’re going to expect of them. Um, do you allow questions at a group interview?
Yeah, absolutely. So the way we run our group interviews is we, um, so after we’ve given our our list of values, um, we allow the candidates to ask whatever questions they want. We just open it up and again, like you said, it, it opens it up for, you know, somebody might ask a question which triggers another question for somebody else or somebody else may never have thought to ask that question. That may change whether they really want to work for us or not. Um, how many questions do you ask? So we, in our interview process, we ask one question. And so, um, think of a really good question that you think would, um, make people stand out about somebody like about why they want to work there, why you know, and really know what you’re looking for in the answer. That’s something else that’s gonna kind of make a candidate stand out a little bit more than somebody else’s.
How they answered that question. You may have 20 different really good interview questions. You want one that’s going to really tell them that or tell you that this person is somebody that you want working for you. Um, what if someone comes late? Yeah, good question. Again, with the conventional, um, interviews you’ve booked an hour, whatever it is, offer this person. If they come late, you might as well interview them anyway. Right? Cause they’re there, you’ve booked time off with a group interview at our interviews, we actually lock the door when we tell them, you know, if, if our interview time starts at five o’clock, our door is locked and we’ve had candidates that come and get angry at us because we’ve locked the door. But we make it very clear in the email that we send to them that we are going to lock the door.
And again, it helps us to, um, sort of figure out like if he’s, if the, if the person is late for an interview, chances are pretty good. They’re going to be late for work. So again, do you want to hire somebody that can’t even make it on time for an interview? Yeah, absolutely. And compared to a conventional, um, interview where you actually bend over backwards just you, um, just to fit their schedule into your schedule for you to be able to interview them first of all, the group interview and eliminate that. And again, it sets an expectation of what is expected of the employee once they start to work. Um, how can you really know if the person is the right fit for your team? Yeah. So once you, um, decided if you want to hire that person, um, or, or possibly that’s a, um, a possibility, what we would recommend is that you bring that person in for a shadow day.
This is bring them in some time during the week and let them see how it is that your, you work, what it is, um, what your, your life is like, basically what, what things they’re gonna do. I mean, you can tell them what they’re gonna do, but until they actually see it, they’re not gonna really know. [inaudible] you can often get sort of a little bit more of the personality of the person when they’re doing a shadow day. Um, we recently had somebody come in for a shadow when they did a really good interview with Edmonton Bookkeeping. The interview was great, but they weren’t going to be a good fit for our team cause they just, their personality once they got into the team was, it just wasn’t what we were looking for. Um, so it can, it can help so much to just, um, kind of again figure out who is actually gonna fit on your team.
And the, one of the advantages of having the group interview now you hire somebody and another employee quits. You have a whole pool of people that you’ve already interviewed. You already know, um, that you think they’re gonna fit. You don’t have to go through the process all over again. And I know, especially for small business owners that are doing all the work themselves, not only do you have to do the hiring, but you have to do all your other work too. It has to get done. And so this kind of just takes that pressure off and helps you just to have a pool and just, um, you can just hire when you need somebody. You don’t have to, um, take two weeks or whatever to just somebody with Edmonton Bookkeeping. Absolutely. Yes. I think that’s all the questions we have for today. I hope you guys liked it.
Um, if you are interested in, um, looking at more details on this hiring strategy, um, we would recommend that you come to our bootcamp. Um, um, we have one in August, August 10th. Um, usually he, we, we ha we helped with that, Nate, so yeah, feel free to come. It’s free. Um, you just have to be at the event page on Facebook and if you have any questions about this video or comments, please, um, comment on our section below and please click like and subscribe if you, uh, if you like our video. Um, thanks again for watching our video and we’ll see you guys next time.