How to hire properly

William Scott formerly ran marketing and advertising services group CommQuest, as well as public relations firm Smart Group. He says businesses must remain vigilant during hiring processes.

“In the early days sometimes you go for the cheaper option and in key areas you’ve got to be very careful that you don’t hire the wrong person and empower them for the wrong reasons. So there’s probably a couple of staff in the early days that we put on board because we were growing so quickly we didn’t have time to interview them the right way.

“Reference check, and make sure they’re culturally aligned to your business, but also they had the skills they say they have in their resume. They say that 90% of resumes have lies in them so you need to check them out.

“We’ve got our own company called Smart Jobs, which is another one of our businesses, but smartjobs.com.au is where we recruit a lot of our staff from. In the sales area you need to make sure… sometimes you’ll hire five people and you only get two good people out of it, so it’s a bit of a numbers game and you need good recruiters to do that so we’ve got… we’re in Melbourne, Sydney, Newcastle, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide and Perth and we’ve got five recruiters to cover those areas.”

To read more about William Scott and Smart Group, click here.