Hiring employees for your business can be a complicated process when you’re looking for the very best candidates. With experience always being a factor, businesses sometimes rely too much on experience that can limit choices. Once in a while, you’ll run across a prospective employee with limited or no experience, yet exhibit key traits you look for in your company. Rather than automatically reject them, should you consider mentoring them or do you limit candidates down to what they’ve done before?
If you choose the mentoring route, the time you take to be a mentor will be more valuable than you think. Time is the only factor you have to think about, even though doing mentoring doesn’t necessarily have to be a time-consuming endeavor.
Helping Career Directions
When choosing the mentor route, you set up fresh new skills for an upstart that adheres to your same philosophy. This can be very valuable to the new employee as well and place him or her on a career path to success. Plus, your insight can inspire the employee toward advancing quickly. You’ll be steering them in a career direction with a particular point of view that could change their life later.
Visiting Other Departments
Doing mentoring means visiting the departments of your company where you might not ordinarily visit. It’s a cliche to think of the CEO never taking the time to go down and talk with employees who work on the bottom floors. Mentoring a new employee there can help you find out the realities of what these employees really do and deal with on a daily basis. Your mentor role also gives you a better reputation in your company as not being a company leader who stays in his ivory tower.
Giving Meaning to Your Leadership Role
There’s a price to pay staying isolated in the executive world and never bothering to mentor a single employee. After so many years of that, you’ll start to feel like there’s no meaning to your career. Reports are that 70% of CEO’s who feel isolated in their job think it affects their performance.
Those that stick with isolation seem to ultimately think doing mentoring is simply too complicated. The fact is, it can be done with only half an hour on designated days and can be as simple as imparting your valuable experiences rather than detailed training.
Should You Include Experience with the Mentoring?
Even employees with experience should have mentoring to gain a better understanding of your company’s philosophy. It can override any prior procedures burned into their brains. The inexperienced employee will probably have some kind of experience anyway, whether it be volunteering or a basic job when a teenager. A basic idea of what it’s like to have a job is all you need in an employee to help shape them to becoming a longstanding and outstanding employee. Even if they might usurp your job when you retire, you’ll know you were singly responsible for helping them get there.
References:
http://www.tlnt.com/2013/08/21/5-really-good-reason-you-should-consider-being-a-mentor/
