OREANDA-NEWS. April 26, 2016. Some things in life are a given: cereal is better with milk, high heels hurt, and if you have a growing business, hiring is par for the course. It’s often said that employees are your greatest business asset, so hiring is naturally is a large piece of that pie. However, it can be challenging to find the right talent, and ensure your hiring process is stellar.

To assist, we’ve enlisted the advice of Vicki Sanderson, Global Head of Solutions at Fairsail, a global HR management system; and Brandon Metcalf , COO of TalentRover, a staffing and recruiting software company. Both Fairsail and TalentRover have human resources apps on the Salesforce AppExchange. We also sourced great advice from a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Katherine Ryder, founder of Maven. Ask yourselves these questions when interviewing potential hires. If you answer ‘yes’ right away, then you have a winning candidate.

1. Do they embrace the entrepreneurial spirit?

As a startup or small business, your team members will wear a lot of hats, and often not the party kind. “It’s become sexy to work at startups, but in reality, it couldn’t be more unsexy. We work all the time,” shares Ryder in a recent interview in Glamour Magazine. While you might strike the party hat, there are many different roles and responsibilities that often reside in the small business atmosphere. “You need very entrepreneurial people, because they’ll be doing 10 jobs at once,” says Ryder in the same interview.

2. Did they interview well for hard and soft skills?

When hiring, you’re looking for many skill sets, and they can be categorized into hard and soft criteria. Hard qualifications include the required skills for the job, such as competence, experience, time management, etc. This is easy to glean from resumes, references and basic questions, and they’re quantifiable. These skills can be taught. “If the candidate has interviewed well for the ‘hard’ criteria, then you need to assess and measure their ‘soft’ skills,” shares Vicki Sanderson of Fairsail. Soft skills include values, behaviors and attitude. Oftentimes, soft skills are much trickier to quantify, and impossible to teach. “My rule of thumb: If I have to think about whether an individual will fit in with the rest of the team, then they usually won’t. It should be natural or obvious, no thinking required. There’s no point in bringing a new member into a team who doesn’t have a ‘can do’ attitude, or someone who doesn’t ‘go the extra mile’ if the core values of the existing team support this.”

3. Do they fit within your company culture?

Your company culture is your own, and it won’t change for every new employee. Therefore, a crucial criteria for hiring is culture fit. No matter how smart and talented the potential hire may be, if they don’t fit in with the rest of the company, it will be a very challenging transition. “Hire for culture fit above anything else," says Brandon Metcalf of TalentRover. Culture is all about alignment and believing in the same core values. As Vicki Sanderson agrees, “Whilst you need different skills and players within a team, their core values and beliefs should be aligned.” This should be second nature to the new hire, and often part of the soft skills mentioned earlier.

Hiring can be the most important part of your growing business, so think about the answers to these questions for each candidate who walks into your office.