Episode 488: 3 things business owners forget when hiring staff
"You want to have a workplace that you genuinely believe in what they're doing."
Hiring for your small business isn’t just about finding someone with the right skills—it’s about finding someone who truly fits. A bad hire can drain your time, energy, and money, while the right one can help your business grow in ways you never imagined. But how do you know who’s the right choice?
In this episode, Fiona Killackey breaks down the key things you must consider before making a hire. She shares practical advice on how to look beyond the resume, ask the right questions, and make hiring decisions that align with your business goals. If you’ve ever struggled with hiring or worried about making the wrong choice, this episode will help you approach it with confidence and clarity.
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Hello and welcome to episode 488 of the MyDaily Business Podcast. Today, it's a coaching episode. And if this is the year that you want to finally hire somebody, or maybe you’ve just hired someone but didn’t really do much research before you hired them, then today’s episode is absolutely for you.
Before we get stuck into that, I want to let you know that group coaching is open, and we’re already interviewing people. So please, please, if you’re interested in group coaching for 2025, go and check it out at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. You can apply, then we do an interview to see if we’re both a good fit for each other. If so, we’ll kick it off in late March. If you’re listening to this at some other time, you can always join the waitlist. We open this twice a year.
The other thing, of course, is to acknowledge the beautiful traditional owners and custodians of the lands that I’m recording from. It’s a very, very hot day in Melbourne where I am, and I want to pay my respects to the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I also want to pay my respects to their elders, past and present, and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
Alright, let’s get into today’s coaching episode.
So, it’s still the start of the new year. Whether you’re listening to this now in real time or at some point in the future, chances are, as a small business owner, you want to employ people at some point in your business.
Today, I wanted to talk about three things you should really look out for. I’m not just saying this as someone who’s employed a whole bunch of people myself, but also as someone who has worked as a manager across national companies with huge teams. I’ve consulted into massive companies and helped a whole bunch of small business owners build out their teams.
I’ve seen what works, what doesn’t work, and the kinds of gaps people often miss when hiring. I think, especially with your first few hires—or maybe your first executive or senior hire—these things can get overlooked.
So, without further ado, I’m going to jump into them. You know, I’m someone who likes little acronyms or frameworks, something you can easily remember. For this, I’m going to give you the three Fs: FFF.
So, I guess these three Fs will hopefully help you avoid saying "F" or going down the "F" for firing route.
When you hire people, the first one is fit. So, are these people a good fit? What that means is, are they values-aligned? Do they have the same sort of interests?
Now, that doesn’t mean you have to hire people who are cookie-cutter versions of each other. Absolutely not. You should be getting a diverse and varied group of people who will work well with you.
So you can learn a lot by asking people particular questions. And I guess that fit also goes into, you know, even from the very start—like when people are applying for a role, making them answer a couple of questions that are different to just sending a cover letter and your CV through.
Because if you ask them to answer certain questions—and I do this for everyone that I hire, even on an Upwork ad—I will be like, "Please answer these three questions." And if they don’t answer the questions, I’m like, "You couldn’t even be bothered to answer the questions, so I’m not going to go ahead with this."
So, you can qualify people a lot earlier by just asking them to answer some questions in their application. One of those questions might be, "What are your values?" Or, "If you had to name three values that you think are really crucial to how you show up in the workplace and who you are and what work means to you, what would those values be?"
And just seeing if there’s some sort of alignment. Again, this is not trying to make cookie-cutter people come in, but understanding that they are going to work in your business. For some roles, they’re going to be representing your business, and you want to make sure that you’re on the same path.
The other thing is for them—and I’ve sort of hinted at this—but is there a genuine love for what you do? We spend so much of our time at work, and whether you're employed by somebody else or whether you work for yourself, a huge majority of your best years is going to be spent working.
And so, I think I read or heard the other day recently that if you work full-time for somebody else, like in an employed role, you spend more time with your coworkers than with your kids or with your family. So interesting.
And so, you want to have a workplace that you genuinely believe in what they're doing, especially if you're sacrificing time with your family, sacrificing, I don’t know, time just working on yourself, etc.
I know that at my last employed role, this was not a question that was asked in the interview stage. But also, I kind of went for that role as a test. The recruiter had come to me. I was newly back in Australia from England. I’d been working at an ad agency, well, not an ad agency, a digital agency. And I had wanted to go out on my own.
Then this job came—this offer came to go for the interview, and I went and got the job. It was great, you know. But I ended up becoming head of marketing and having this exec role. I had never bought from this company before. I was not a customer of them. I really had no great interest in what they would... I mean, I had an interest in fashion and in style and stuff, but I wasn’t like a huge advocate for the brand.
And then I became head of marketing for this brand, which I enjoyed the role.
I met some amazing people, had a great team, and I learned so much. Like, so, so much. As much as I've maybe said negative things, I also learned a lot from a lot of the people. My boss at the time, I learned a lot from her.
But I wasn't obsessed with the brand. I wasn’t, no. Part of the reason I left was because I couldn’t, in all honesty, feel integrity in marketing certain things in that brand.
So, I feel that that is a crucial thing that is missing, particularly when you're hiring a senior member. You want that person to love it. You don’t want that person to have resentment. You don’t want that person to be like, "Yeah, because they're leading people, they are leading other teams or other people in that environment."
And you also just want them to be fulfilled. You want them to come to work and be like, "Yeah, okay, when things get tough, I know that we're really working towards something great here and I’m part of that."
So, that is the first thing—the fit. Now, the fit can be, again, I really want to stress, it can be people from all sorts of different backgrounds and everything else. But you want to know that they have an understanding and a values alignment to what it is that you're trying to build as well.
The second thing that I think is really important—and again, is something that I don't think is interrogated enough in the interview process—is this: I always say to people, "Better to have a couple of extra interviews, get the right person, then hire somebody and then have to fire them."
I know that, especially in corporate, and I'm in Australia, it is quite difficult to actually fire somebody. You have to kind of manage them out. There has to be lots of reasons, and you have to have a lot of paperwork and a trail showing all these instances.
So, you want to be really clear that, even if you're in a small business, a very solo operator or whatever, and you're just going to have someone remote, imagine that it’s going to take you months to manage that person out. You want to make sure you hire the right person from the start.
And one of those things, the second F, is facts. So, what are the facts?
This is a bit of a controversial topic. Well, it shouldn’t be, but I think people present their best selves in an interview. They do. Everybody does. I would. Everyone else does. You know, you're bringing your best self to an interview, you hope.
But with a couple of key questions, you can determine if the facts are correct—if the examples they’re giving actually reflect that they were a huge part of that, rather than just "I happened to be in a team and it was really the manager that did all this work."
But I’m going to say, the interview should focus on skill set understanding and certain technology tools. People can absolutely lie about their skill set here. And this is where you want to interrogate to get the facts.
And so, questions here that you might ask is, you know, when people say, "Tell me an example of a time when...," really asking, "What was your role?" "What did your role look like on a day-to-day basis?" Or, "What did your job look like on a day-to-day basis?"
And then, when it comes to tech tools and that sort of skill set, literally be asked—even if it's on a Zoom call—I have totally done this. Like, "Hey, let's share the screen. Could you just show me an example of how to build this up?" Or, "Could you show me an example? If I put some text in here, could you show me how you could use this in the back end of Squarespace or Shopify, whatever they're saying that they can do?"
Recently, I was interviewing people for my virtual assistant role, and I found the most amazing person. She’s great. And one of the people that I was interviewing, she had said, “Oh yeah, I do a lot of podcast admin.” And I was like, "Oh, that's great. Awesome."
I then asked, “What platform is your podcast or the podcast hosted on?” Because there are a lot—you know, we use Simplecast, there’s Libsyn, there’s Buzzsprout, there’s so many. And it's much like a website—you need a hosting platform for a podcast.
And she sort of seemed quite confused. I said, “Oh, is there a platform that you put, when you're doing the admin and the behind the scenes, and you're uploading the audio, where do you do that?” And she kind of stumbled and she was like, “Oh, I can’t remember what it’s called.”
And I was like, "Okay." I then asked, “What’s the name of the podcast?” And she couldn’t remember that either. And I was like, “Okay, you would think if you'd been…” And this person had said they’d been working on it for two years.
I was like, you’d think you’d know the name of the podcast host. It was just such a quick evolution to, “I’m actually completely lying about what I’m saying.”
So many instances. All it takes is a couple of other questions, and it doesn’t have to be negative and horrible or micromanaging, but just, “Hey, tell me about your role,” or, “Tell me what that entails,” or, “If we did this, what would happen?” Or, “Have you ever done this before?”
I’ve worked at places where I've previously consulted to huge corporations. They will have, like, a sliding scale of, "Okay, between 1 and 10, how would you mark your knowledge of this tool?"
And I have to say that this is a bit of a generalization, but in a lot of the places I worked, when it was done, men would traditionally mark themselves like 8, 9, or 10—usually a 9 or a 10 out of a tool—even if they’d only been using it for like six months.
A lot of women would mark themselves six and below. Even one particular person, I think she put seven. She was a genius. She had been working with this tool for 10 years. And I was like, "Wow, you’ve put seven?" And she’s like, “Oh, because there’s still, I guess, areas for improvement, or I guess maybe there’s things I don’t know.”
And I was like, okay, you are totally 10. Also, keep that in mind. You know, I'm talking about a negative instance with this podcast admin, but there's also people where, by talking to them, by actually getting them to show you, you're like, wow, okay, your skill set is way better than I thought it was going to be.
So, the facts is asking for actual examples. If you're hiring anyone senior, I absolutely would ask for multiple interviews, but also for them to present to you and also to do a little like mini example.
I remember with my role that I went into, I did a whole slide deck on all the things that could be improved about that brand. From a digital perspective, from an in-store perspective, from something else. I mapped it out globally with where e-commerce was at.
Like, I did a lot. I probably went overboard because that’s just me. But I remember when I was head of marketing, we interviewed for the head of PR or the PR manager. So, that person was going to be in charge of the PR team that had about three staff in it.
I remember we were doing the interviews, and we had this person, and they seemed great on paper. They came in, and this was 2014, you know, Instagram was there. It was definitely not where it is now, but influencers and all of that were around. This person was going to be in charge of any kind of influencer collaboration stuff that we’re doing, media outreach, all of that.
And I said, "So, can you think of like five fashion influencers you think would be a good fit for us as a company?" And they really stumbled.
I said, "Just one. Like, just one fashion influencer." And they took so long. They were quick on their feet with every other question. But this was their second interview, and they could not think of one person.
Then, we went through some other questions, and then I went back to it. I said, "Oh, have you thought of anyone now, or anything else you’d like to say?" They couldn’t think of a single person.
And I get it, people are nervous. But even that—like there was no follow-up with like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry about today. My mind went blank. Here are some people.”
But they had come across in their first interview, and in which was with somebody else in the team. And then, you know, it’s small things like this, and it’s not like trying to catch people out, but just get the facts. Like, what are the facts?
Also, asking people for analytics, statistics, all of that, if you’re going to hire them. Because again, you don’t want to spend months trying to fire them and try to manage them out of the business and just have that like bad energy.
So that’s the second one—facts. So we’ve got fit, facts, and the third one is future. So, future, future, future. Where do you think our business could go? Asking these questions.
But also, where do you want to go? Where do you see yourself in that whole “Where do you see yourself in five years?”
But also, like, where do you see yourself in this company? It was like, just have those conversations. You can have these conversations with people in your team now. It doesn't have to just be in the hiring process, but asking what else are you interested in?
They might be like, actually, the plan is I would start my own business similar to yours. And sometimes people are like, "Oh God, you would hate them." But maybe you're like, "That's awesome." Because they're going to be in here trying to learn everything, take on everything, build everything, and do it on somebody else's dime in a way. But at least they're honest.
Like, I think asking people, like, where are you going? Where do you want to go with this? You know, I remember asking when I first employed a VA back in 2017. I interviewed a few people in Australia, and I remember one of the people in particular. I was asking her about inbox management and admin, and she said a comment like, "Yeah, this is a bit below me right now, but it's a filler job."
And I was like, I want somebody who genuinely wants to do inbox management, who's excited about spreadsheets and organisation automation. And so I think that idea of like, where are you going? Where's the future?
That person who said, "It's a bit of a filler job," she was like, "Oh, I actually see myself doing XYZ." I’m like, okay, cool. I mean, at least she was honest in a way. But I just thought, I actually want somebody who's interested in what they’re doing. Which I guess goes to the whole idea of future. Like, what are you interested in? What do you want to learn about?
When I employed the last person in my company, she was saying how excited she is about AI. And we have an AI tool, Poppy, we talk about it a lot. I got her a Poppy account, and she was genuinely excited to go in there and test it out and use it.
Whereas other people that I'd employed, when they'd been given this, you know, I'd go in and have a look, and there was like, nothing done. They just didn't see it as something to be interested in and learn from and upskill on.
And so I guess that's a big thing with the future: to think about where are they going, but also where are you going as a company? Which brings me to the next part of the future, which is what other skills will you need?
And it's very hard, I know, with the rise of AI and everything, to know exactly what skills you will need in any of the people that work for you. We have a freebie. You can get it at mydailybusiness.com freestuff, which is the skills matrix.
And I think this is a really important thing because it has skills, experience, and interests. And when you think about the future of your company, you may not have the funds right now to hire, you know, a graphic designer, and a videographer, and somebody who's a copywriter.
Right now you might just be hiring the copywriter, but you might go, actually, like, they start saying, "Oh, you know, I have my own social media and I love making videos and I'm really into Capcut."
You're like, awesome, because I see a path for you to then move into the entire social media management and also videography. And so that's just one example of hiring people that have an interest and understanding that again at the start.
This is where you look at the skills matrix and you literally think about the role you're hiring for and the role you need right now, but also the role you'll need in like 12 to 18 months.
So if you haven't already, download the freebie at mydailybusiness.com/freestuff, the skills matrix, and use that to determine the role that you need right now and in the future.
Because if you can get people to talk about their interests, this is something that if you're interested in it, then if they're going to, you know, you could pay for them to do some training, but they're going to be excited about that because they have a genuine interest in it.
This is opposed to hiring people who are good right now but actually have no interests, experience, or skills in what you'll need in the future.
The other part of future is to think about it from the perspective of the business and their understanding of, for example, the environment, financially, and future forecasting.
Asking them questions like, “Where do you see this industry in the future?” and “Where would you love to fit in in that?” Being future-focused can be a really good thing.
When you're hiring somebody, you're like, okay, I see you growing. And also, they can see themselves growing in the business. They can see where there is room for succession, where they are going to go, and be like, “Okay, you know what, I’m gonna stay here for like the next three years,” which is a lot these days for people to stay, or maybe five years even.
They're like, "I can see my own growth in this business."
So that's really it for today. And if you are hiring people and you want to work with me on that, we can do, you know, so much in a one-on-one session.
You can check out those and any other kind of business coaching packages at mydailybusiness.com/shop.
I mentioned at the start, group coaching. It is open. If you're interested, please go on over and apply. I would hate for you to miss out. You can do that at mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching.
But to recap today, the three Fs that you really want to be focused on if you're hiring people, particularly—well, I was going to say particularly senior staff, but I really think anyone.
And again, you don't have to be doing this just at the hiring. You could do this at six-month reviews and everything else.
The three Fs are: future, facts, and fit.
We'll have all of this in text format, which you'll be able to find for this particular episode at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/488.
Thank you so much for listening. I'm going to get out of this hot room where I'm recording and I'll see you next time.
Bye.
Thanks for listening to the My Daily Business Podcast for a range of tools to help you grow and start your business, including coaching programmes, courses and templates. Check out our shop at mydailybusiness.com and if you want to get in touch, you can do that by email at hello@mydailybusiness.com or you can hit us up on Instagram at mydailybusiness_. You can find us on TikTok at mydailybusiness or find me Fiona Killackey on LinkedIn. I look forward to connecting.
