As business owners, we do a lot of hiring: designers, copywriters, performance marketers… you know the drill.
Of course, hiring someone is the easy part.
The hard part is hiring the person who’s extraordinarily good at their job.
So, to increase your odds of hiring someone great, try organizing a competition
Here’s a simple framework you can use:
- Decide what kind of person you need to hire. For the sake of this insight, let’s imagine you’re hiring a web designer.
- Create a competition for a project you’re working on. In this case, imagine your competition offers a $5K prize in exchange for redesigning your brand’s most important landing page.
- Promote your competition. If you already have an audience, promote it there. If not, the easiest way to do this is to promote it on social platforms, like LinkedIn and Twitter.
Why this works
People like competition, and people like money.
And it’s often difficult to gauge how good someone is, even by looking at their past work. Context plays a huge role.
By creating a competition, you get exposure to a large sample of talented people doing their best work for your brand. It’s the best insight you could ask for.
For what it’s worth, we’ve never done this internally. But, when we hire people for writing roles, we offer a test project to top candidates so we can see their skill in action.
It’s worked well for us so far. A competition basically takes this principle to the next level.
