Throughout many discussions with business owners and human resource professionals over that last few years, one common and consistent challenge revolves around staff. How to find and hire the right ones, how to train develop and keep them engaged, hold them accountable. Eventually there also comes a time when one has to decide if it is a lost cause when it comes to a particular individual or employee. Since this is an extensive topic, we will break it up into a few parts and will first tackle attracting, selecting and hiring the right ones to work with.
One cannot ignore that it is a two-way street; and which side of the street is busier depends on the job market at that particular time. Regardless of circumstances, you are not helpless and cannot forget that fact, become a victim of circumstances or end up hiring someone out of desperation-that is an exercise in futility. An empty seat is much better and less costly than a seat occupied by a dud or liability.
If your company were a house, it would have to have great curb appeal to attract viewers. Success begets success and successful or ambitious candidates are looking for like-minded companies that run a good shop and know what they want. Do you know what you want?
I mean, honestly, can you describe the ideal candidate’s temperament, soft skills, attributes, core values and aspirations? Can you do the same with your values?
A simple example is you can put up an ad that say: “looking for a baseball player” and you may get responses from anyone who has ever picked up a baseball bat or glove. Alternately, you can put up an ad that says: “Looking for baseball hitter with a track record of a number of home runs or pitcher with this average strike outs” now that would narrow down the pool of candidates for you.
The other important part of this is to get this message to all the right places and specifically the watering holes for your target candidate list online, offline, in person or however, whenever and wherever is relevant. Another good practice here is to nurture relationships and open the dialogue with highly desired candidates before you ever need them just in the same manner you nurture your sales pipeline.
Once you get the desired responses, next main area is a screening, interviewing and vetting process which has be well thought out, written out, applied and followed consistently with ruthless focus and discipline. Do you have system for spotting inconsistencies on resumes? A system for verifying the facts and data you are presented with? Other people involved in the interview process so you can compare notes? This will help you avoid being charmed by the wrong candidate and helps you compare apples to apples, per se, as you interview numerous candidates.
While you won’t find all the answers in this short article, it will hopefully help you ask yourself or team some questions and start building the right answers. Stay tuned for the next installments on this topic; or visit our blog (http://sbchecks.com/blog/) in the meantime for more about this and other related topics.