I do not have a client that has not told me it is hard to find good staff. Every industry, every job duty. Now add up the costs of making a mistake and you are really behind the eight ball.
Here is what all of us want:
We have a new position – or we have to fill an existing position. We advertise on LinkedIn. We get great response, whittle the list down to three then make an offer that is accepted. The fit is great. Same core values as the company. Really good at what they do, they are in the right seat. Three years later, they are still performing really well.
That is perfection in the hiring process. Here is a challenge for you. Run through your list of hires over the past three years. How many of them fall into this category. My guess is somewhere between none and 1 or 2. That is not helping your business.
So what do you do? How can you get closer to having a perfect recruiting system? What are the obstacles that keep you from this perfect recruiting process.
I have a client who has the best HR person I have ever met. Couple that with a CEO that has great wisdom. They are getting it right. Here are things they do that you may not be doing.
You need to retain a recruiter. This is not a head hunter – rather it is a person that is an expertly trained recruiter. They know what questions to ask, they know how to vet a perspective new employee. You, the business owner, are not trained to do this and you will fall short most of the time.
You need a personality profile of the candidate. And it needs to be evaluated by someone that has been trained to do these evaluations. To your credit, many of you are giving candidates the DISC assessment (or something similar). That is good but not enough. What training have you had to evaluate the results?
Go to the next level and retain a recruiting psychologist to evaluate the person. This is a DISC assessment on steroids. The same client I mentioned earlier has retained a company to evaluate each candidate. The psychologist issues one of three decisions: recommended, recommended with reservations or not recommended. Their claim is if you hire a person they recommend, the success rate is very high and if you hire someone that is not recommended, you will fail. The cost of each evaluation is $1,000. The process includes interviews of the top executives of the company (to understand the core values) and then an hour long interview of the candidate. The person that was offered and accepted the job could not have been better. It is still early; she’s been on the job a couple of months. But so far the results have been great.
This was one very good solution on how to recruit top talent. There are a lot of companies and there are a lot of methodologies. I believe you need to create recruiting strategies for various staff categories. You do not need to spend $1,00 per person where the pay is low and the job responsibilities are limited. Save that for the high level positions.
Like many business owners, my first impression of making this a more expensive and complicated process was “we don’t need to do this.” I thought that until I looked around at all the failures. I have the advantage of knowing how many companies work, what is good and where you struggle. I know your recruiting process is a struggle. But there are good solutions.
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