Hiring staff is one of the most important tasks you can do as a business owner.
Hire a poor staff person and you live with that decision for months, potentially costing you thousands of dollars in wages and lost income if they were a highly productive employee.
This is like any other area in a business. You can do it with great skill or fumble through it with few skills.
The hiring process begins with the advertisement for your business and the position.
Unfortunately 98% of all recruitment ads are written with little to no thought and experience about what the content of the ad needs to be.
As a result it “attracts” typically low to medium level quality people. Most ads promote experience and the resume as the most important attributes looked for by the wording or intent of the ad. This means your ad looks just like everyone else in the business world.
You may not think this is true, because you wrote the ad, but it is to the employee’s eyes and mind.
Let’s look at why this process is not likely to “attract” the best quality people you have ever seen when you run a recruitment ad, as should be the case.
First of all, answer this question…
Would you prefer an employee who has a decade of experience, which means a decade of learning how to work their own way, with their own habits, which is the makings of a “superstar” or would you prefer a person who is a fast learner, accommodates and anticipates your needs or the needs of other co-workers and works hard unsupervised and thinks on the job to solve their own challenges?
The first description can mean they start off great after you hire them and pay them mega-bucks, but over weeks or months they irritate you and/or other staff due to their habits of doing things their own way.
The second description is of a person without much experience so they are a bit slow getting started, learning by experience, but the rest of the staff and you like them and enjoy seeing them learn and problem solve and anticipate other people’s needs. This person isn’t paid meg-bucks nor do they feel they deserve mega-bucks as they don’t believe their experience warrants it.
Now, which employee would you prefer to have? If you’ve ever hired a “superstar” you’ll recognise the first description of that kind of person.
You need to be clear what your highest priorities are for hiring. The first description is about experience being highest priority, the second is about attitude being the highest priority.
When you want to hire someone you don’t want to be “interviewed”, you want to interview them. You have the job on offer, so you need to be the one asking questions, not answering them. Hiring on experience means they feel like you will be lucky to have them working for you, so they ask you questions to see if your business is worthy to hire them.
The ad determines the quality of the callers and the volume. Most people don’t “attract” great quality people. That’s because they don’t like the look of the ad, so they don’t call. They may think, “looks like I am working for another company where I’m not appreciated, I don’t think I’ll bother calling them”.
There are dozens of people who are sick of working for a boss where they aren’t appreciated and are looking for a better company to work for. Your recruitment ad is the ad for your company as well as the position, so if it fails to attract great quality people, its not because there aren’t great quality people out there, its because your ad is poorly worded and designed.
There is great skill in advertising to be learned. Learning what emotions drive people are where you learn to write great attitude attracting ads.
How do you advertise your company, what words do you need to use? What angle do you need with the ad, how do you attract great quality people by appearing different to all other companies who advertise for staff?
These are the questions you need to answer very effectively before you place an ad, or write the ad.
If you want to learn how to recruit fantastic, high quality, great attitude employees you can spend years learning it yourself, or you can learn from Business Building Mentors.
For over 13 years we’ve been writing recruitment ads for business and monitoring the results. We’ve taken this process to such a high level we have one ad we now give to attendees of The Business Freedom Workshop Series who use it for all positions for any business. Yes, you probably think that’s impossible and even recruitment agencies state it is, but they unfortunately are wrong, because everything seems impossible, until it isn’t.
The ad we give all our clients is the same ad and only 2 things need changing, the position title and the phone number. What’s more the ad pulls consistently between 50 and 120 applicants.
Instead of asking for resume’s we teach business owners to ask specific supplied questions on the phone and in 4 questions determine if they have a great attitude and select the best 20 for the next step, where we ask them 8 more questions.
Keep in mind this process has been used by law firms, builders, service businesses, retailers, manufacturers and everything in between or 13 years, for positions from office junior to general manager, impossible to get and easy to get employees. Our best result was for a building company in Mackay who found it impossible to find or hire good quality tradesmen or other staff they needed.
Well after 115 calls from the first ad (to a mobile number used) they hired 17 other employees in the next 5 weeks in additional to their existing 30. They were hiring plumbers, electricians, estimators and a lot of other titles for positions.
This ad is a part of a whole system for recruitment that shortens the process down to about 4 hours in total from start to finish over 2 weeks. How does that compare to your own process by way of time and successful outcomes?
Want to know how well your process works? Ask yourself this question, “would I rate my all my recently recruited staff as great?”
If not, then you’re missing out as this is the common majority of our clients comments about staff they hired using our systems, even months after they hired them.
We commonly get compliments from candidates calling from the ad like “you are obviously a great company to write an ad like that” and these comments often come from people who live outside the region who just want to call up to pay that compliment and wish they could apply if they lived in the area.
When was the last time you got a compliment from someone about your own recruitment ad?
The ad is part of the process and the most important step, the ad attracts the cream of the crop in the market place. The questions we give them qualify them and their attitude.
There’s more to this process than can be given to you here, much more in fact.
If you want to learn this exceptionally power skills and system then register to attend one of our 7 Steps to Business Freedom – Free Business Seminars. If you like what you hear over 3 years, including content on team building and recruitment, you are welcome to attend The Business Freedom Workshop Series, the ultimate small business management course that gives you a full recruitment system ready to use instantly (in Workshop 2), plus an equally refined team building system that turns staff into a high performance team that work as hard as you do, even when you’re not there!
Find out more about Business Freedom now and how you can simplify your recruitment process down to 3 steps that take only hours. Register for Business Freedom now.