3 Hiring Traditions To Avoid
Reimagine your recruitment process and avoid these 3 hiring traditions in order to attract the best talent to your business.
Imagine this: You have run a successful family business along with your spouse for more than 20 years. But you have never seen the challenges with finding employees as you have in the past 12 months.
When the first set of COVID restrictions limited your ability to do business, and most of your staff had to stay at home, you picked up the extra hours, just to keep the doors open.
As the covid restriction were slowly lifted, business began to pick up again, but the employees did not return. However, in order to keep the lights on, you continued to work the long hours and fulfill the orders for your customers.
You hired some new employees, trained them, thought that they would be as good as your old employees, but they ended up leaving, or you became dissatisfied with their work effort.
But you continued to do what you had always done, and worked even more hours, dreaming of getting back on your bike, or taking that family vacation that was planned from 3 years ago.
The extra hours would just be temporary.
The extra marketing you had planned would bring in more revenue and you could eventually hire good employees.
So you posted on the job Apps, increased your hourly wage and even threw in some flexible hours. Dozens of people applied, and for those that met your criteria, you reached out for an interview. Only to hire the one person who showed up for the interview, and then have them quit via text after their 2nd day.
Eventually you threw up your hands and wondered if you would ever get that family vacation again. Maybe it was better to just sell or close the doors.
A manager can't breathe motivational life into someone else; all they can do is identify each employee's talents and cultivate them.
Does this sound familiar to you? Well this was Mike & Lisa when they reached out to us. Frustrated, tired, and unsure on how they would ever get their old life back, let alone set up their business to be sold in the next 5 years.
We asked them one question. “What does success look like for you?” They both answered emphatically, being able to spend more time with their teenaged children.
After a quick analysis of their business it was determined that no matter what they did to increase revenue, it was not going to get them more time with their family. They had to solve their employee recruitment and retention problem.
If you’re interested in attracting the best talent to your business, reimagining your business recruitment process is critical to your chances of success.
3 Obsolete Hiring Traditions To Avoid
These three obsolete hiring traditions are limiting business growth and attracting poor quality candidates.
Tradition #1 We need to “replace” a retiring employee.
If you have a long term employee, more than 10 years, that is leaving or retiring, simply replacing them will put your business back a few steps. An employee with more than a few years of experience, that has not kept up with technological change will have out dated skills. In fact, only 29% of new hires have all the skills required for today’s job, let alone ones needed in the near future.
Tradition #2 – We need to focus on traditional sources & talent pools.
The use of existing online job sourcing apps is becoming over-utilized and time consuming. Many of our clients receive dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants, only to select a few quality candidates, that do not respond or show up for interviews. Many highly gifted candidates are being found outside of traditional post-secondary institutions, as virtual learning offers new opportunities.
Tradition #3 – We can attract talent to our place of work with a paycheque & job description.
Ouch! This one hurts, as the current job market allows candidates to be increasingly selective. Simply raising wages does not work either, as it not only eats into profits, it doesn’t align with the values of candidates. Successful businesses are evolving into structuring “Employment Value Propositions” that highlight things such as career development opportunities, mentoring, meaningful work with a collective cause or proximity to family and lifestyle interests.
Is there one solution?
Traditional hiring practices have focused on replacing a leaving employee with another employee. It is like putting a square peg in a square hole. Business is always changing quickly, and as we have seen with the impact of the pandemic and economic stressors, there needs to be a greater focus on what is needed for tomorrow’s successful organization.
Therefore, avoid these 3 hiring traditions and hire for potential, rather than experience. Accept that the pace of technological change is increasing and it is necessary to expand your search to a broader skills market. An expanded search, places less emphasis on academics and elaborate formal experience and focuses on developing existing employees or finding self taught or remote located hires.