Hiring is both one of the most exciting and nerve-racking aspects of building a business. On the one hand, it signifies growth, and this is always good. But on the other hand, it presents you with considerable risk. Hiring the wrong people can at best cost you money and time, and at worse, it can seriously derail your company’s progress.
As a result, it’s imperative you find ways to hire the right people, and also to avoid the wrong people. But how exactly do you do that? Like everything, it’s much easier said than done. So here are a few things to keep in mind to help you succeed in finding and hiring the right people for your company.
Expanding the Candidate Pool
A good place to start when trying to improve your recruiting efforts is to work to expand your candidate pool. The logic here is that the more people you get interested in your open positions, the more qualified candidates you’ll have to choose from, making it easier for you to find the right people.
There are a couple of ways to expand your candidate pool, such as:
- Make use of technology to streamline the application process and respond better to people who show interest in your open positions.
- Be active on social media platforms, specifically Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, so as to establish an employer brand that will attract people to apply for your open positions.
- Improve your candidate experience so as to minimise the number of people who drop out along the way, which effectively reduces the size of your candidate pool.
These are good places to start, as they will help bring in more applicants from your positions. You’ll then be able to be more selective about who you bring in for further interviews, which will enhance the overall quality of your candidate pool and increase your chances of finding the right person.
Be a Proactive Recruiter
Part of this process involves becoming a proactive recruiter. In Australia, 78 percent of employees (as compared to 75 percent around the world ) consider themselves passive job seekers. This means that to get people’s attention you need to make a lot of noise. You need to give them a good reason to leave their comfortable position of gainful employment for something new and uncertain.
This might mean engaging with a recruiting service that has contacts within the industry, or it could consist of more aggressively pursuing people currently employed at competitors. But no matter the approach, the point is that the days of posting on a job board and waiting for the responses to roll in are long gone. You need to go after people and encourage them to apply, as this increases the number of applicants you get, and also the chances you have of finding the right person.
Offer Competitive Benefits Packages
Another way to make your candidate pool larger is to make your positions more attractive. If your compensation packages aren’t competitive, then many of the best-qualified, or best-matching, people out there might not even bother to apply for your positions, causing you to miss out on a chance to hire talent that can transform the business.
Take a look at what your competitors, or other brands that regularly succeed in their recruiting efforts, offer and figure out ways to match or outdo them. This will help catch people’s attention when they begin looking for positions. If you need help designing benefits packages that stand out in the industry and that you can also afford, consider working with a specialised benefits management firm to design packages that can help make you a more effective recruiter.
Prioritise Cultural Fit
When expanding your team, it’s tempting to want to go after the most qualified person with the most amount of experience. However, this isn’t always the best move. For one, these people are often the most expensive, and sinking yourself into a hole by forking over a huge salary might not be the smartest move at this stage of the business. But almost more importantly, experience doesn’t guarantee cultural fit, and this is something you should absolutely be concerned about.
Company culture is going to be what helps your company carve out space in the market and remain competitive. It’s what helps people build an affinity with their employers, and this, in turn, makes them more productive and effective. As a result, you need to be hiring people that are going to contribute to and advance company culture. This will allow you to secure people who can grow into the role and who will be committed to making the company a success just as much if not more than they are concerned with advancing their own career.
Hiring for Culture
Designing a recruitment strategy around culture can be a challenge. In general, there are two ways you can do it:
- Be loud about who you are. Broadcasting company culture through your website, social media and job boards will help you establish and spread your employer brand, which will attract people more apt to be a good fit, and repel those who aren’t. The Netflix culture deck is a great example of this working in action. Founder Reed Hastings identified right from the beginning what type of culture he was looking to build, and this helped him put together a team committed to making the company a success.
- Pay attention to people’s values. During interviews, ask people questions that reveal a bit more about who they are and what type of culture they are looking for in a company. Ask them to describe their ideal company, or to identify the core elements of a successful company culture. Compare these answers to your own vision for the company, and this will give you valuable insight into what these people can do for the organisation, making it easier for you to decide who to hire.
Putting an emphasis on culture will allow you to evaluate candidates more holistically, which will you give you a better chance at making the right choice.
Recruiting Is a Full-Time Thing
Securing the right people for your open positions will determine the success of your company. But to do this, you need to treat recruiting as a full-time business function. Waiting to recruit until positions to open up is going to harm your ability to attract a large candidate pool, and it will rust your talent evaluation skills, making it harder than it needs to be to hire the right people and avoid the wrong ones.
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