Sooner or later every business has to hire employees. While this may be a sign of growth and prosperity, it brings significant challenges as well.

It can be incredibly difficult to find the perfect (or even good enough) person, one who is qualified for the job and able to integrate into your work environment and adapt to your corporate culture. Plus it’s expensive and time consuming to hire and train a new employee, so you want to make sure to get it right.

In addition, state laws provide protections to workers that can make it harder than you think to let someone go. And any attorney will tell you that HR is one of the areas of greatest potential liability and exposure for any business.

At Pure Green, we’ve hired (and fired) many employees, with some measure of success. After more than two years, we still have four of our original six employees, something we’re very proud of.

We’ve also had some epic failures.  What follows are some tips based on our experiences, for better or worse.

Job Description

Before you hire, or even interview, anyone, create a written job description for the open position. This doesn’t have to be anything particularly elaborate. At a minimum, you’ll need two lists—one that covers all of the responsibilities that the employee will have, and another that specifies the qualifications you are seeking in a candidate.

Provide the job description to anyone interested in the position. Ideally, an unqualified candidate will see the list and realize that he shouldn’t waste your time. This doesn’t always happen, but even if it saves you an hour or two, it’s worth the effort.

The job description also gives you a way to evaluate a candidate. Does she meet the qualifications? Does she seem able to handle the responsibilities of the position? It’s easier to make those decisions when everything is laid out in front of you.

Make sure to hire for the position available, as opposed to a position that might open up in the future. This may seem obvious, but we have run into this issue more than once. For example, we once interviewed a candidate for a budtender position. She was a talented writer who we thought would make an excellent social media coordinator, a position we were planning to add in a few months.

We hired her, figuring she could work as a budtender until we could plug her into the social media role. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the skill set to be a budtender and we had to let her go before we could move her into social media. You should always have an eye on the future when hiring, but make sure you don’t lose sight of the present.

Get A Cannabis Resume

We don’t interview anyone until we have seen a resume. It gives us a decent snapshot of a person’s experience and helps us to weed out unqualified candidates. An applicant who can’t put together a resume probably can’t handle the responsibilities of working at Pure Green.

Make sure that the resume lists cannabis experience. Many folks will bring you the resume that they use to apply for other jobs. This type of resume excludes a great deal of relevant experience with regard to consuming, growing, processing and selling cannabis.

We have, on occasion, returned a resume and asked for the weed version. People may be unused to, or uncomfortable with, putting that information in writing, but you need it in order to make the best decision possible.

The Interview

Hiring a new employee after one interview is a bit like choosing a spouse after one date. While that may sound like an impossible endeavor, that is what we have to work with as employers.

The interview is your best opportunity to gather information about a candidate, as well as to get a general feel for them as a person.  And while it may feel wholly inadequate, you can optimize your interviews to maximize your chances of making a sound employment decision.

Be creative about your interview questions. I recently read an article about HR managers’ favorite interview questions. One said he always asks a person what their favorite Monopoly property is. He said that a person’s answer gave some indirect insight into their character and personality.

Another said that he always conducts interviews for higher level positions at a restaurant in order to see how the candidate treats the restaurant staff. Again, this indirect type of knowledge can sometimes give you more information than canned answers to typical interview questions.

We have added a practical section to our interview as well. For example, when interviewing for a budtender position, we ask the candidate what they would do in the following scenario:

A customer comes in to buy an ounce of flower. She wants to split it three ways between an indica, a sativa and something that tastes really good. Here is a copy of our menu. What three strains would you recommend and how many grams of each to split an ounce three ways?

The applicant doesn’t have to answer perfectly in order to be hired, but her answer gives us a great deal of information. We learn about her level of product knowledge, her math skills and her ability to think on her feet. We also get to see if she gets flustered if she doesn’t know the answer to a question. All of this can guide and inform our decision.

References

If a candidate does well on an interview, make sure to check references before making any decisions.  We try to talk to at least one personal reference and one professional reference.

We realize that an applicant is going to choose people who will speak highly of him, but that means that he has at least one former boss who will say nice things about him. That may not mean a ton, but it does say something.

At a minimum, I would be wary of someone who can’t offer references or whose references won’t return your calls.

Hiring can be scary. Employees have access to your products and your money, so you need to make sure they are trustworthy and reliable.

In addition, corporate culture and chemistry are delicate, and one disruptive employee can wreak havoc on an otherwise productive workplace, making hiring choices more challenging and fraught.

Making matters worse, the tools we have to evaluate candidates—resumes, references, interviews—can be woefully inadequate. But these are the tools that we have. All we can do is optimize them to make the best decision possible.

The good news is that, like many things in life, as you gain experience with hiring your instincts will become sharper and your choices will get better.