The most common request that I receive from entrepreneurs is for help with recruiting needed employees.

Assistance in locating individuals, qualifying their skills, checking references, presenting offers and negotiating salaries and benefit packages are all steps in the recruiting process.

Few, if any, of us receive formal training in how best to find and retain key employees. Unfortunately, we are left to invent processes and techniques that are sometimes flawed and incomplete. Even the most experienced recruiters may have a success rate that looks like a major league batting average.

The challenge with recruiting starts with a lack of organization on the part of the entrepreneurial enterprise. With no defined process, the art of finding the right person becomes random, with some managers doing a better job than others in finding people.

To see an improvement, try formalizing recruiting around a few key principles and processes. Recruiting principles to follow:

. Hire "A-Team" players. Hire individuals who are better than you at the required task.

. Use all available resources to locate candidates. Network through your existing employees. Contact associates. Use your board and your investors.

. Be thorough in your evaluation. Ask all of the questions, check all the references and then a few more.

. Recruiting does not stop on the first day of employment. Continue to recruit your new hire. Keeping a key employee is just as important as finding him or her in the first place.

Recruiting processes to follow:

. Develop a written job description for the position. What will be the employee's responsibilities? To whom will the employee report, and who will report to the employee? How will you measure success in the job?

. Formalize a procedure for finding candidates. Remember that the quality of the candidates recruited is directly correlated to the quality of the final hire. Once you have identified your best sources, make contacting them a requirement of anyone tasked with hiring a new employee.

. Know what questions to ask during the interview. The interview process is one of the most flawed steps in recruiting. Develop a script of questions. Make sure that your staff knows what they can legally ask. Be careful in how you frame your questions. For example, a question with a yes-or-no answer can mask needed information, while a question framed for an open-ended response will require the candidate to reveal more.

. Document your interviews, reference checks and findings. When did you talk to the individuals? What were the relevant findings? Were all of the responses consistent? I always like to ask one last question when checking references (especially when all of the references were supplied by the candidate): "Who else might you suggest that I talk to regarding John Doe?" This is an attempt to find someone who knows John Doe who may not be John's best friend.

. Make your hiring decision based upon the facts, not your feelings. Henry Ford once said, "You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do." Many individuals are great interviewers. You need to see through the interview to all of the other information and then make your best selection.

Formalizing the recruiting process can save both time and future heartburn. Getting rid of the wrong person can be more time-consuming, costly and disruptive on an organization than spending quality and organized time during the recruiting process.

Companies that have quality staffs know that recruiting is part of their "secret sauce."