The Workplace Coach

Its not often that my blog articles include a ‘to be continued’ but I really wanted to make sure that the message about firing people quickly sunk in. Quickly does not mean sloppily, you have to do it right to make it stick, but it doesn’t have to be a long onerous process.

This second installment is going to focus on hiring, and why you should take your time to get it right. Often in business one of your biggest investments (some would say expense) is your people, so it’s critically important that you get the right people into your business.

How do you select someone to join your organisation?

Typically there is a four step process (with a few slight variations) with the focus being on getting a bum on a seat as soon as possible. In fact, that used to be a key recruitment metric, ‘time to hire‘ which was a measurement of the time it took from advertising the vacancy to getting someone in the door. The theory was that a vacant role has a negative impact on productivity so the quicker we fill the role the better.

You know what is worse for your business than a vacant role? The wrong person in the role. Even more damaging is when they stay and stink the place up for years, doing just enough to keep getting paid and not get themselves fired.

Okay back to the recruitment process, it typically goes something like this:

1. Consideration of four to five CV/Resumes
2. Interview the top two to three candidates
3. Do a cursory check with the preferred candidate’s referees
4. Make the job offer with a push for a quick start

Have you run a recruitment process like this?

Perhaps you’ve been the candidate?

There are two ideas that I want you to consider next time you are looking to hire someone for a vacant role in your organisation:

1. Imagine that when you hire someone, you’ve hired them for life. You cannot fire this person. The selection decision you make is permanent for your business. Your workplace is not a family but what if you treated recruitment the same way as you would inviting someone to be a permanent member of your family. You would take your time to get it right, and you would get some opinions from other members of the family first.

2. Consider that if you hire someone for $100,000 a year and they stay for 10 years then you’ve just made a $1,000,000 decision. If you were buying a piece of equipment for your business, and it was going to cost one million dollars, I hope that you would do your due diligence and take your time making sure that it was going to perform in the exactly the way that you need it to.

Your organisation will likely have some recruitment policies and procedures. Understand that these usually include the MINIMUM requirements and that you, as the hiring manager, can add however many more steps as you want to the process to ensure a better selection decision.

You might want to include in your process a work based sample exercise. If the position requires the ability to conduct a sales call, do a client presentation or write a media release… then get your candidates to do one as part of the selection process.

You might want to invite your two preferred candidates, separately, to grab a coffee with you and one or two key clients or stakeholders. This is about seeing whether the personal dynamics are going to be okay. You might even want to introduce them to some of their direct reports, for the same reason.

Give them a tour of the facilities, invite them to chat with other employees and ask them questions about what it’s like to work here. Make sure they are crystal clear about reporting lines, expectations around working hours, where their office or work station is going to be, and where they are going to park their car. Give them a real picture of ‘a day in the life of…‘.

Recruitment is very much a two way street these days and in this information age of knowledge workers, its a candidate’s market. Candidates are checking you out just as much as you are looking at them. There are two decisions that will come out of the selection process, the first being whether or not you make them an offer, and the second being whether or not they actually want to work for you. Keep in mind that while the remuneration is important, it’s often not the deciding factor. They can probably get offered the same money somewhere else.

If you are recruiting to a key role (in other words any role in your business) and would like some help, just book a call here and lets make sure that you make one of the best hiring decisions of your career.

#theworkplacecoach