How to improve your chances of recruitment success
Finding and recruiting the right staff can be one of the biggest headaches for any business owner or manager. Getting it right is brilliant – you’re happy, the individual is happy and everything is hunky dory. But getting it wrong can be a costly, time consuming and generally unpleasant mistake.
So how can you ensure you get it right more often?
Here are our top tips…
Know exactly what you’re looking for and why
It’s all well and good knowing you need an extra pair of hands, but before you launch in and start advertising for a position, it pays to take time to really nail down what gaps need to be filled and the best way to fill them.
If an existing staff member has left, pause and take a moment before looking for a like-for-like replacement. There may be elements of the exiting staff member’s work that might better be assigned to someone else in the team, thus creating a new and more specific role in your company.
Define your selection criteria
Many companies are all too keen to start the recruitment process without giving prior thought to the exact skills and requirements they need from a new team member. There’s no point having a generic advertisement and job description – all this will serve to do is waste both your own and the applicants’ time. Keeping a job description and your requirements tight should mean a better, more suitable pool of candidates. Trying to stick to a defined set of selection criteria when sifting through CV’s will also help to whittle down to a shortlist much quicker.
Be thorough
Interviewing candidates for a position is something that managers either love or hate. Although it is true that you can often get a feel for a person during a face to face interview, this is usually highly subjective. Adding a bit more ‘science’ to the process can really help identify the individuals that are most suitable for both the role and your business – particular when recruiting for more senior roles in a company. At Agenda, we have worked with many companies during the recruitment process, using DISC profiling to help successfully identify the candidates that display the personality traits most suited to vacant roles.
Induct properly
It’s surprising how many businesses fail to ‘on board’ new members of staff properly, especially when they’ve often spent a lot of time finding and selecting the right person or people.
An induction shouldn’t just be about dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s – it should be about making the new member(s) of staff feel familiar, comfortable and confident in their new role. There’s no worse first impression for a new member of staff than a disorganised or non-existent induction. So try to ensure that a plan is in place for their first couple of days at least, and preferably assign a member of your existing team to look after them in their first week.
Taking induction outside of the workplace is also a nice idea. Arranging a welcome lunch or after work drink for a new staff member, along with their immediate team, is a great way to break down barriers and help newbies get to know their team better, and vice versa.
Here at Agenda, we know that getting the right team in place and doing the right things can make huge improvements to a company’s bottom line. We’re big fans of profiling – both when recruiting new staff and optimising the performance of existing teams. For more information on our services in this area, please contact us.
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