Many years ago, I visited the offices of a certain financial services company and above all the lintels of their doors was the phrase ‘Think of yourself as the customer’. Anyone remember it? It struck a chord with me at the time and has stayed with me since. We split ourselves in half somewhat; half thinking as the candidate, the other half the client. Both essentially want the same thing, or at least two sides of the same coin.
Which brings me to the point of this post. How do we, and by extension you if you’re interviewing and hiring, see things from both your and the applicants’ point of view, to get the best outcome for your business?
I may be accused of pandering to entitlement, but in most cases, candidates have a real choice about whether they decide to work for you or not; and if they are joining you because they have no other choice, is that a bad hire?
Whatever product or services you sell, the chances are you don’t approach selling the idea of working for your business in the same way. You should, but that doesn’t mean shouting about yourself all over socials. It means the whole package, from the very start of the process to the very end, when your new member of staff is settled in and happy.
Important things to consider:
Do you have an Employer Brand? If not think about changing that, if done authentically it will help you attract better candidates and retain your team. We developed our employer brand with a HR and Talent Specialist, then realised we’d also practically written our value proposition and mission statement, the two are so intertwined.
Is your hiring process vigorous, do you have a process at all? Does your job description sell your role and excite candidates about the opportunity to work for you? Or is it a really boring document that someone wrote 5 years ago? Rewrite it and give the role some personality.
Do you ask the right interview questions? Not many hiring manager have any training to do that and one common thing we find when taking interview feedback is that the interviewer has spent most of the interview talking about the company or the job. Good for ‘selling’ the business to the candidate, but not rigorous enough for the hirer.
How do you onboard new starters? Where companies leave a gulf between offer and start date day, there is an increased risk of the new hire either being ‘bought-back’ by the company that they were intending to leave, or taking another role entirely.
Signposts for help
We can help with many recruitment and retention things, but the legal end, contracts, disciplinaries etc, are better served by a HR professional and we can recommend some really good ones. There’s lots of useful information about interviewing, hiring and onboarding people on our website and you’ll find the links below.
If you’d like to chat through your challenges and needs just get in touch with me. Someone I’d not spoken to for ages rang me last week and said they were really surprised I was still around. Not at all offended. ?
https://creativeresource.co.uk/resource/interview-guide-for-hiring-managers
https://creativeresource.co.uk/resource/how-to-successfully-onboard-new-starter
https://creativeresource.co.uk/resource/right-questions-interview