Every day is a battle for productivity when you’re a small business owner or consultant. And, if we’re being honest, productivity can be especially hard to hold on to during these warm summer months when BBQs and beach daydreams wreak havoc on our day.

Spend time up front to nail the right hires, and build a strong, cohesive team.

Hiring is hard, regardless of your industry or the surplus of candidates in the job market these days. In 7.5 years in business at Metal Mafia, I have hired a lot of great people for my team--but I have also hired many more who were not the right fit. Somewhere after the fifth or sixth bad choice, I decided I must be doing something wrong in the hiring process and tried to figure out how I could recruit and hire more accurately.

Here's what I learned and how I modified our hiring process:

Performance within groups typically does not just happen.

For a group to really perform well, it needs practice. The group needs to understand the best way to organize itself for performance.

This concept is commonly understood by sports teams and the military. They clearly see the need to give groups opportunities to practice. Boot Camp for the military and pre-season workouts for sports teams are the norm.

It’s interesting to note in business that there is far less interest or appreciation of group development and the need for practice. Team practice, for the most part, is not factored into the business or corporate world. We form groups in business and march them into the corporate battle zone expecting them to perform and when they fail we are surprised.

Following the Supreme Court’s split decision last month regarding Arizona’s 2010 immigration law known as S.B. 1070, three principles are clear:

1. The federal government’s role in setting immigration policy supersedes the efforts of all states in this area;
2. Despite the decision, certain state immigration laws requiring employers to enroll in E-Verify will remain in operation until the federal government says otherwise; and,
3. The stage is set for a comprehensive reform of existing immigration law by the federal government sometime in 2013 regardless of who is elected as the country’s next president.

Nothing, in my opinion.

However, from the ridiculous overabundance of articles, comments, and recruiting conference content that trashes job boards as if they are the worst source of hire, I am obviously in the clear minority.

I continue to see and hear well respected thought leaders in the staffing industry make claims that the value of the job boards is waning and that the quality of candidates on the job boards is low, and it hasn’t slowed down.

Because there is such a strong belief that job boards somehow only offer low quality candidates, I am taking the time to offer a different point of view, as well as leverage statistics to prove that the job boards have the same percentage of “A” players as LinkedIn or any other source of hire.

Simple exercise for team building.

It uses questions from a Mensa quiz to illustrate the point that a team’s collective wisdom is always greater than any individual team member’s.

To get started, see how many of these questions you can answer individually. According to Mensa, if you can figure out 23 of these, you qualify for “genius” status.

(I’ve filled in the first one for you—check the bottom of this post for the complete answer key when you are done.)

There’s a famous story from the early days of the space race.

President John F. Kennedy was visiting NASA headquarters for the first time, in 1961. While touring the facility, he introduced himself to a janitor who was mopping the floor and asked him what he did at NASA. The janitor replied, “I’m helping put a man on the moon!”

Let’s face it. The economy is still a mess and people aren’t finding jobs fast enough.

Given this fact, there are a lot of people looking to place the blame for these developments. And has been the case for the last several years, many are focusing on employment screening and background checks. I won’t say that all who oppose background check are flat out wrong in every instance, but all too frequently they rely on myths, misconceptions and urban legends to support their arguments.

Here is my list of the most commonly held misconceptions about employment background checks:

Vince Lombardi is widely considered the best football coach of all time, and ultimately may be the greatest coach in the history of all sports. He is credited for his success because of his ability to inspire and motivate players, however that is only part of the story.

Vince Lombardi was a truly great entrepreneurial leader. He was successful because of his ability to find players that had the passion and desire to win, which inevitably made his job easier.

How can today’s entrepreneurs leverage the teachings of Vince Lombardi to identify talent that will drive the company to success?

Small business owners understandably may be reluctant to use non-compete agreements for many reasons.  The desire to divert precious resources to paying an attorney to prepare a contract is hardly appealing.  Similarly, businesses may feel that such agreements are unnecessary because they have few employees.  But as Ben Franklin once wisely advised, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.