Recruiting the right people for your team is a vital skill. It’s also one of the most difficult things you’ll ever have to do.
Selecting the best candidate for a role means you’ll need to assess their industry knowledge and expertise whilst also considering their personal attitudes and values. To help you with this process, we’re going to discuss what makes a successful recruitment process.
Skills and expertise vs values and attitude
Take a look at current recruitment advertisements both in specialist industry publications and online. What do they mainly focus on?
As action coaches we often notice that so many businesses have adopted inadequate recruitment processes. Very few seem to realise that factors such as skills, qualifications, responsibilities, hours of work, etc are a starting point. If you’re hoping to attract the right applicants – those who will work well with your existing team and add to overall efficiency you’ll also have to think about values and attitudes – the so called ‘softer skills’ – and ensure these are reflected within your advertisement.
Cultural fit
Cultural fit centres around which of your applicants would be best suited to the culture and ethos of your organisation, but how are you going to find this out?
We suggest you put a two or three stage recruitment process in place to enable you to assess both skills and values. Perhaps you could set up situational testing – ensuring a certain level of skills are met or involve the team who the successful candidate would be working with. Most importantly, you need to be very clear about your company’s values and working culture and make sure these are communicated well to potential employees.
Your recruitment process
Let’s think about this in a slightly different way. Assuming you’re able to find an applicant who you think possesses the right attitude, does your business have up to date, relevant and appropriate systems in place? Is there adequate training available within your business to enable this applicant to become a great performer and a real asset to your team?
If not, you’ll have to reconsider your entire recruitment process. The challenge is for everyone to understand that, in order to develop as an organisation, you need to bring people through who already have the correct attitude and then work on them to be high performers.
All too often we notice the opposite view tends to be adopted. Too many recruiters see things purely from a skills perspective. Recruiting someone with the right skills, qualifications, expertise, etc, but poor attitude is a real gamble. They’ll more than likely alter the status quo of your company culture. Can you really afford to take this risk?
The human side of the recruitment process
Always put the human side of the recruitment process first. Remember, successful recruitment revolves around fit. If the candidate fits the business – and the business fits the candidate – the easier it will be to build a team that works well together, and in turns becomes integral to your overall success.
If you’d like to learn more about the systems and processes we use with our clients to improve their recruitment system, feel free to call us on 02392 454 111 or get in touch if you’d like us to help you achieve your recruitment goals.
