Drive your business forward by hiring the best

Part One

This issue I start a series of articles on driving your business forward through the use of productive, motivated and superior staff. I will focus on three main issues: hiring the best, getting the team motivated, and letting go the under-performers.

So, to start off the series, I am going to look at some ideas to help you hire the best.

How do you identify the best candidates, and then secure their signature on a contract of employment?

Here are some tips and guidelines that I think you’ll find useful, no matter if you’re a sole practitioner looking to hire your first team member or an affluent multinational corporation with a rich history…

The Recruiting Process

To state the obvious: there are two main options on how you handle your recruitment needs – in-house, with advertising in the newspaper, on-line and looking for internal referrals, or by using a specialist search firm.

How this process is managed has a major impact on how prospective employees view your company.

It’s mostly about marketing and positioning at this point. You want to attract the best talent, right? Then it is critical that your opportunity and your company are portrayed in the best light possible.

Passing this responsibility to an inexperienced hand will ultimately lead to failure.

Sure, anyone can place an ad and get a response from the job market, but will a novice be able to attract the right respondents? Unlikely.

Make sure that you are not literally sitting on top of the perfect candidate already

Before you commit to either route, you should make sure that you are not literally sitting on top of the perfect candidate already. Always assess your present employee base to see if there are any star performers at a grade or two below the vacant position and ask yourself if they might be ready for a step-up.

If not, then look at your top performers and ask each in turn if they know of anyone who might be suitable for the position. On the basis that like attracts like in the professional world, it is likely that your top performers mix in circles of top performers at other companies. Is there anyone that they know who would be a good fit that could be approached?

A small referral fee can make a huge difference to the response you receive

A small (say $1,500) referral fee for staff who refer a candidate who ultimately joins the firm can make a huge difference to the response you receive, and compared to the advertising costs and labour involved in dealing with advert responses, it’s dirt cheap.

Don’t forget to post the job internally – a job notice board or intranet posting could uncover some talent that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Great care is needed in producing your advert – it’s an ambassador for your company

If you decide to handle the recruiting process yourself, crafting your advertisement is the next step. It’s a skill in itself – advertising agencies get paid thousands of dollars to develop advertisements for their clients, and rightly so. It’s a long and labourious process that can only be perfected by experience.

Great care is needed in producing your advert – it’s an ambassador for your company in the job market, but it also has to focus on the key skills and experience you require in such a way as to appeal to the ideal candidate and make them respond.

Then you wait and hope that the ideal candidate just happens to look at the careers section on the day your ad is run.

A flood of resumes

Be prepared for a flood of resumes to any job advert on-line or in the press. That sounds great, but the truth of the matter is that, if you get 200 applications, maybe five or six might be truly suitable, and you have to review all those resumes to find them.

Even then, you’re not done. Of those 5 or 6, you might find one who, when you meet them, IS really suitable.

And still, you’re not done. You haven’t covered even a tiny fraction of the market. Why? Because the people who you REALLY want to hire don’t even look at the help wanted ads. They’re too busy developing their career with a competitor to have the time, and they’re being too well compensated to have the inclination, to look around.

The only way you will gain access to this, the most important sector of the market, is through a professional search firm who know their stuff!

They directly approach only potential candidates who fit the bill. They know the market and they have access to a huge referral network that employers can only dream of.

It’s this inside knowledge, direct marketing approach and search business expertise that adds value to your recruitment process. You only get to see a shortlist of maybe four or five candidates, but to produce that short list, maybe several hundred people have been approached and maybe twenty or thirty interviewed by the search firm, in order to produce a short list of five.

By the time you have got to the short list stage, you know for sure that any one of the candidates could do the job and do it well. You need to meet them now to decide on “fit”.

Next time, we’ll look at how you can identify tomorrow’s superstars in the interview process and we’ll discuss how to put an offer together to clinch the deal.