Realize that everything that you do in the marketplace reflects onto your brand. Speak well, and people will think highly of you. Act like a bull in a china shop and people will think of you like a bull in a china shop. If you invest your time to learn to handle recruiting well, this investment will set you and your team up for years of success! On the other hand, if you mail it in, or under-emphasize your efforts when recruiting and hiring, you will often hire the wrong persons, or miss out on the best candidates, and get it wrong. Getting it wrong sentences you and your larger team to subpar performance for years… You cannot let that happen, when hiring the right people is so very possible. Read on….
- Realize that the way you choose to treat your interview candidates will determine how they feel about you personally and how they feel about your organization and your brand for the rest of their career and for the rest of their lives. You need to take that seriously and avoid treating your candidates like they are cattle being rounded up in the pen. It is essential to demonstrate care and courtesy for your interview candidates during the process. Show your manners, offer them water, or a coffee and help them to get comfortable before you begin your Mike Wallace impression and start firing questions at them. Follow up with them after their interview and keep them informed about their status in the process. Send them a hand written “thank you” card after the 1st interview. Call them personally should you need to let them down gently after being a finalist for one of your positions. The bottom line is that you should treat them from start to finish like they are going to become your most important customer in six months, and you want to leave them with a very favorable impression that you are the consummate professional, don’t you? In my career, I have interviewed several people who were not my final selection who became employees later or who later became our company’s customers. You never know where your ripples will end up, do you?
- Don’t hire the candidate with the perfect resume and who “knows it all”. Rather, hire candidates for their attitude, cultural fit and willingness to listen and be coached. The successful candidate’s experience will build eventually if you hire people with the right stuff and you train them diligently. Far better to have great people who fit your culture than to have a person with the perfect experience and a poor mindset or a poor cultural fit. Make the right selection, and if you don’t have a candidate who is a great fit after the first round of interviews, have the courage and the conviction to start over and engage a second batch of candidates. I would rather do without an “A” player for a month or two, than to hire a “B” player and accept their shortcomings, unless they are exclusively in the area of experience. I am willing to wait for experience to develop when someone’s values and character are a good match.
- When the winning candidate has accepted your offer, send them a handwritten “Welcome To The Team!” card. Tell them about your excitement and map out how their first week in the role will be spent learning the company, their teammates, tools, culture and responsibilities. Generate excitement! Too often, a candidate is hired, and begins to wrap up their duties at their current job, and then encounter two weeks of “radio silence” from their new employer. Trust me, there is never a better time to ensure that you’re building excitement from your newest hire than in the two weeks before she officially joins the team. Keep in touch and let her know that you are excited for him/her to bring his/her many talents to the team. Get other members of the team to join in the warm welcome as well.
- Once the candidate has joined the team, give them a notebook and tell them to write down questions, no matter how small or seemingly silly. Then commit to spending sufficient time with them each day during their training period to help them gain context and feel like a warmly-welcomed member of the team. During their first week with the team give them a very graphic description of your expectations and how they will be successful during their first 30 days, and longer. Help them to understand clearly how they can contribute meaningful results to your team and demonstrate their value to the firm.
- Get your new associate thinking forward during their first week on the job. Get them thinking of you as a peer, not as “The Boss,” by offering to work together on their 30-60-90-day plan. Talk with them about what they want to learn, what they want to accomplish and what it will look like at each of these milestones during the early days. Guarantee that they have a clear picture in their mind of what the next year will look like, and how they can ensure their success in delivering results for the team. Build momentum!
- Schedule a recurring one to one meeting with your new associate as their leader during the first day on the job. Help them understand that you’ll be meeting and talking to them regularly about opportunities, accomplishments, challenges, development, tools and training. Start this from day one! Let them know that you take their success personally, forever!
All right, that should ensure that your recruiting and hiring efforts are met with a considerable measure of success. If you follow the recommendations in these last three posts, you will be well on the way to the Stairway To Hiring Heaven. Queue the music, and let’s let Jimmy Page and the boys in Led Zeppelin rip through their album rock classic…. There you go. With these three blog articles, you have a detailed plan of action to go into the market and make waves by recruiting and hiring the talent that will drive your future success! We wish you a very successful journey toward improving YOUR hiring efforts.
Michael is a Business Advisor and Executive Development Coach in Minnesota who delights in helping Medium Sized companies in the technology sector to build culture, develop high-performing teams, and win in the marketplace more often. Michael is kicking off monthly business workshops in the Board Room at his offices in Prior Lake, MN. The spaces in these amazing workshops are limited, and interest in the workshops has been very strong. Workshops are planned for: Behavior Analysis and Emotional Intelligence, Teamwork and Collaboration, Business Communication, Conflict Management, Time Management and Productivity, Performance Management. If you’d like more information, or you’d like to reserve one of the eight seats in an upcoming workshop, please send an email to info@michaelbeachcoach.com today! Michael Beach Coaching & Consulting, “Delivering Ambitious Results!”
