Building your Dream Team » Needs Assessment

Establishing Criteria

Download: Needs Assessment Tool

Before you start your journey to build that dream team, you must first list out the criteria and ask yourself, “What kind of person do we want to work for this company?”  This can be done by a company standard, or you can use our needs assessment tool to discover the different areas in which you would hire someone.

The needs assessment has a 5 sections. While this may seem a little over-the-board, it is important to make wise decisions when hiring a person. As we established before, one of the most common cause of deaths for companies is employee turnover.

In the general overview, we’ve compiled 8 different questions that are important for you to establish BEFORE you start searching for people and interviewing. The needs assessment is done so that you have a clearer picture of who you’re targeting. It also allows for your team to be on the same page.

Other team members might be useful to tap into during this process. For example, if you are replacing someone due to a termination, then talk to those that worked with that person. What personality traits did they like and didn’t like? Why were they fired? Why did you hire them in the first place? What could they have done better? How could you have managed better?

Don’t be afraid to ask more questions (or add sub-questions) than those listed.

Planning different aspects such as the skills you look for, the people involved in the process, and the environment this employee will be involved with will eliminate time and effort. This will also help you target where exactly you need to market your job opening.

In the end, remember that since you are dealing with humans, no person is perfect.

NOTE: You run the risk of hiring the wrong person for the job if you skip this step. If you hire the wrong person, then not only do you have to go through the hiring process all over again, but it can also cost the company in a variety of ways. From decreasing company productivity to impacting customer relationships, hiring the wrong person can have large negative effect. In addition, terminating the new hire can also be a difficult task that is avoidable if you screen, interview, and vet properly.