The Future of HR and How to Build Teams for the Modern Business

Written By: Peter Demangos, Co-Founder of Collage and Founder of PDF Financial Group

An entrepreneur’s goal in their business should be to become obsolete. By that, I mean to build a business that runs without being dependent on the founder. When in the early stages of business, most often, the founder is the only staff, but that doesn’t mean that there is no value in designing processes sooner rather than later to properly offload work with every new hire. Remember, you can’t be afraid to let go!

But where do you start when it comes to hiring for your business? And most importantly, how do you ensure you’re not just hiring staff, but great staff? Here are my tips:

Leverage technology

Technology allows us to focus on the items that make a difference to our business. The rest should be automated. Let’s look at customer service or even sales. Technology can be a great aid when it comes to tracking client files, cases, tasks etc. The more time we spend manually doing these tasks, the less time we have to spend with our customers.

The same can be said about managing our employees. We can leverage technology to not only streamline and cut costs, but also enhance the experience for our staff when it comes to onboarding, time off management, career development and culture building.

Expectations and clarity

At the highest level, human resources is about attracting and retaining the best people. It’s said that culture is the number one reason why an employee will choose to join a team and stay. And although culture may have many definitions, one thing is for sure, and that is the necessity for clarity and consistency. This is with regards to compensation as well as team interaction and expectations that form the foundation of corporate culture. It’s very challenging to form great culture and respect if everyone is treated differently with no clarity as to why. Spending time to develop the right structure and expectations in place early on can save tremendous time and money.

Hire A Players

In the end, it’s our people that make our business and the right team can be the most sustainable competitive advantage. That said, it’s no easy to task to build a team of A players nor will the journey be smooth. This is why it is even more important to have clear and strict hiring process that not only tests technical skill sets but also involves many other existing employees to ensure proper cultural fit.

At Collage Technologies and PDF Financial Group, we have a very strict hiring process with layered interviews involving many members of our team. We are results driven and we hold each other accountable to our goals, both short-term and long-term which we individually set. We offer staff perks like the ability to work from home, and use technology to improve our business efficiency like Lever for applicant tracking, Slack for team communication, Hubspot for marketing and sales, and Collage.co as an HR and benefits platform (to name a few).

Often time entrepreneurs get lost in the piles of HR paperwork, inconsistency and last minute and urgent hires instead of taking the time to build out a system that will set them up for success from day one. Take the time to build proper HR practices, and you’ll thank me later when you realize you set your business and staff up for success.