The Changing Recruitment Market – Business Planning
When an economy slows, the job market can soften as businesses cut overheads by shedding staff, or as talented or ambitious staff sense that the ship is listing in heavy seas, and decide to swim to a safer berth.
In the instance where employers are the ones who make the cut, the first employees to be let go are likely to be the low-performers, and not the high calibre staff that you need to top-grade your team. However, the most capable staff will often also be among the most intelligent, and among the first to realise that the business that has been paying their mortgage up until now is looking decidedly wan! So it’s they who go looking for a better-run business in which to work.
Would you appear to be one of the better-run businesses if such talent were to be looking?
Constant Recruitment
I’m noticing a distinct trend emerging among my coaching clients of late: Because they get into the almost continual process of top-grading staff – constantly growing their best players, grading out their weaker performers and recruiting new, talented replacements – these clients are now in the habit of advertising positions almost constantly – sometimes even when they don’t have a current vacancy.
As one of them put it recently, “It’s worthwhile just trolling the labour market to see who turns up. It’s often easier for me to create the work for talent than to find the talent when I’ve got the work!”
It can be a chicken-and-egg puzzle, sometimes: If you find the right person with a strong fit to your team, you then often identify a chance to harness their talent to an opportunity you have (consciously or, more often, unconsciously) left dormant up until their advent.
Serious Business
I’m also noticing that my clients are putting more time and thought into the interview and selection process these days. That’s possibly because, in proactively scanning for talent before they need it, they are no longer constrained to make quick decisions to “fill gaps” but have become more focused on developing a good process for achieving a “perfect fit”.
(Mind you, their thoroughness could also be a reflection of the great weight that their Coach places on recruiting only “the right people” onto their bus.)
However, more thorough and process-driven interviewing may also be a response to their growing appreciation of the real cost of allowing the wrong people onto the bus in the first place, regardless of how brief their sojourn may be. At a presentation this week, a recruitment specialist was sharing with me her opinion that picking the wrong person can cost around $50,000 to $80,000 in lost wages, training, productivity, rework and disruption to business; so there’s 80,000 reasons to look to creating some system and surety to your recruitment process for starters.
Employ In Haste Repent In Leisure
Employing a new team member has a lot of parallels with marriage.
It could be said that the best of marriages are more likely to occur where the parties take some time to get to know each other, confirm a cultural fit and identify common values before they commit, and that a lot of bad marriages occur because decisions made when the “desperate and dateless” bypass that period of scrutiny and assessment and take someone because they have a pulse (not that any of my readers would have ever employed someone in haste, just to fill a gap!)
Given that, upon recruitment, you will probably “live together” with a new workmate for more hours in the day than you will with your “significant other” or your children, there appears to be strong grounds for improving the initial interview and selection process.
In a recent coaching session with a Client who is seeking an IT Manager we worked up a simple checklist so that he had some structure in the process and guidance to ask the right questions, gather the right information, and observe the behaviour of the candidates as they responded.
If you are in the marketplace for new staff now – or think you will be in the near future – ask yourself whether, given what is at stake, you would gain a benefit from putting more time into developing your own interview and assessment procedures.
After all, consider the prize: A skilled and talented new staff member, who has totally bought into your Vision for the business, accepts and aligns with your Values and can’t wait to put a shoulder to the wheel and start contributing to the achievement of your Goals!
If you’d like a head-start on developing your Interview System – ask for a copy of our Job Interview Template .
Call in a Professional Matchmaker
Don’t overlook the value that a recruitment professional can bring to the situation next time you’re seeking staff. When I talk with recruiters most of them offer much the same advice:
- Be as detailed and specific as you can about the type of person you are looking for – providing a wish list of personal characteristics is a great help.
- If you want someone who has a positive attitude, is optimistic and has a strong work ethic, don’t be afraid to specify these behaviours as well. (Why an optimist? They have less time off, do more work and produce better results! And when it comes to sales, they are trumps!).
- Be as precise as you can about what skills, knowledge and qualifications you are seeking – and what level you will accept.
- Create a persuasive offer that would appeal to the ideal candidate. Make sure that offer involves a seductive mix of money, security, belonging, recognition and the opportunity to take responsibility and to contribute.
Profiling
Any professional recruiter will generally test for basic skills, verify qualifications, references, performance history and may, within the bounds of the Privacy Act, even go as far as to provide credit reference and background checks. Others offer to run candidates through basic psychological profiling or can recommend suitability profiling you can do yourself.
