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IN THIS ISSUE

• How Your Business Can Start Hiring The Right People

DEEPTHINK

How Your Business Can Start Hiring The Right People

You’ve done everything right. You registered your business with CAC and launched your Nigerian venture. Six months later, you’re drowning in micromanagement, your employees wait for constant direction, and you’re working in the business instead of on it.

The problem isn’t your business model. It’s your hiring process.

Most business owners and diaspora investors make the same critical mistake: they hire based on skills alone. The CV looks impressive. They have a university degree, relevant experience, and solid technical abilities. You conduct a brief interview, confirm they can do the tasks, negotiate salary, and bring them on board.

Months later, you realise you’ve hired someone who can do the job but doesn’t care about your business. They show up, complete their tasks mechanically, and go home. They never suggest improvements, rarely take initiative, and consistently require guidance on what to do next.

You’re not building a team. You’re collecting warm bodies with the right qualifications. And it’s quietly killing your business.

In this article, we discuss strategies you can implement to hire the right people for your business.

1. Prioritise Cultural Fit Over Technical Skills

Here’s what successful businesses understand that struggling ones don’t: skills can be taught, but character and attitude cannot.

When you hire someone with the right values but moderate skills, you can train them. They’ll learn your systems, improve with coaching, and grow into the role. However, when you hire someone with excellent skills but poor character, no amount of training can rectify the fundamental mismatch.

Cultural fit isn’t about hiring people who look like you, went to the same school, or share your social background. It means finding people whose core values align with your company’s values.

If honesty matters to your business, you need honest people who won’t cut corners when you’re not watching. If customer service drives your reputation, you need people who genuinely care about helping others, not those who see customers as inconveniences. If innovation powers your competitive advantage, you need people who enjoy solving problems and trying new approaches.

When values align, employees don’t need constant supervision. They make decisions you would make because they think as you think. This is how you scale.

2. Screen For A “Growth Mindset”

Beyond cultural fit, the most valuable employees possess what psychologists call a “growth mindset” – the belief that abilities can be developed through effort and learning.

People with growth mindsets see challenges as opportunities, not problems. When they make mistakes, they analyse what went wrong and adjust. When faced with tasks beyond their current abilities, they ask questions and figure it out instead of saying “that’s not my job.”

These employees become more valuable over time. They take on bigger responsibilities, require less hand-holding, and eventually become the managers and leaders who run your business when you’re in London, New York, or Dubai.

Contrast this with fixed-mindset employees who believe their abilities are static. When challenges arise, they give up. When mistakes happen, they blame others. When new responsibilities emerge, they resist. These people plateau quickly and often become your biggest headaches.

3. Stop Ignoring Behavioural Red Flags

During interviews, most companies focus almost entirely on experience and qualifications. But a landmark study by Leadership IQ tracked 20,000 new hires and found that 46% failed within 18 months. The shocking part? 89% of those failures were due to attitude, not a lack of technical skills.

Some warning signs you need to watch for include:

• The Blamer: These are candidates who consistently blame others for their problems – “My former boss didn’t understand me,” “My coworkers were incompetent,” “The company’s systems were terrible”. If they didn’t take responsibility there, they won’t take it here.

• The Know-It-All: People who seem to have all the answers and dismiss your questions or suggestions. They are often unwilling to learn your specific way of doing things. You need employees who can adapt to your processes, not fight them.

• The Job Hopper Without Growth: Frequent job changes aren’t automatically disqualifying, but if someone has held six jobs in four years and can’t articulate what they learned from each or how they progressed, they’re likely running from problems rather than solving them.

Action Steps

Changing your hiring process takes more time upfront. Culture-first interviews run longer than skill-focused ones. Reference checks become deeper conversations. You might reject candidates who look perfect on paper but reveal character mismatches in discussion.

But this investment pays compounding returns. One great hire who shares your values becomes two great hires when they recruit others like them. Conversely, poor hires drive away good people, create cultural toxicity, and consume your time.

Want to learn more about Building a Self-Managing Business? This article is adapted from our latest ebook that shows you exactly how to create a business that manages itself, including a deep dive on implementing culture-first hiring in Nigeria.

Send a message to [email protected] to grab a copy today!

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