You Need To Convince Candidates To Join You More Than Ever.
By Steve Schumacher
I have spent a lot of years teaching hiring managers to effectively formulate interview questions, watch body language, and think of interviewing and selection as a major part of being a manager. Evaluating candidates takes a lot of work and even when done well, can be a roll of the dice. These days, candidates are calling the shots when it comes to many jobs. Employers are scrambling around trying to put packages together that will entice candidates.
One of the best business books in the last 25 years is called “Good to Great,” by Jim Collins. He makes the point, about recruiting and hiring, to not settle. I am seeing an increasing number of hiring managers settle for new hires that fill an open position, but are not the ideal candidate at the time. Pressure to fill open positions is very heavy right now and many organizations are giving in to that pressure. Yes, the short-term need will be taken care of, but the question is how will this person do when normalcy returns. As we know, if you settle for a warm body, some of your positions become revolving doors.
Regardless of whether you give in to pressure or not, here are some considerations when trying to sell a candidate on joining your organization.
Do an organization assessment. Clearly, your organization has changed in the past couple years. What was good about your company three years ago may not even be worth talking about today. Use a tool like a SWOT analysis to get a big picture view of your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Gather a few other managers to help you come up with this current snapshot of your organization. Do your best to get people who will be honest, and not just say what you want to hear. It is vital that the outcome is completely honest. It is not ethical to promote something that is not true.
Prioritize. Once you have a good sense of the SWOT analysis, or some similar tool, prioritize all of the items you have identified. It is key to prioritize as a candidate would see those items. It does no good to tell a candidate something that is positive about working for your company if it is not important to that candidate. Of course, many candidates will have differing priorities in what they look for, but with some research you can spot some trends. Flexibility in working hours and location, for instance, seems to be an outgrowth of the pandemic that candidates are not looking for in employment. If flexible work does not work well in your organization, be honest about it. You cannot necessarily change the flow of your production just to make a job look good to new hires.
Improve weaknesses. The SWOT analysis calls for you to keep doing the Strengths, improve the Weaknesses, minimize the Threats, and take advantage of the Opportunities. Work with your team to see if you can improve the Weaknesses to a point that they become Strengths. With so many challenges facing hiring managers, this is a great opportunity for you to do some major overhauls of procedures, policies, systems, etc. Just the fact that you are taking an objective look at how you go about your business should be something most candidate will see value in. Areas you can, and will, improve should be added to the list of items you can share with candidates.
Sign-on bonus. It seems like, in many cases, hiring good candidates is becoming a bidding war. As a consultant, if a person joins you because you offered the most money to accept employment, that person will always correlate money with moving ahead. You are setting yourself up to be a cash register when it comes to hiring. You need to work with HR and your finance folks to see if there is a fund that can be tapped to offer to prospective employees. Hopefully, this trend will not last long. New hires that join you because of the opportunity and challenge vs. dollar signs may be in the minority soon. Money dominates conversations so much that most candidates will not hear anything else about your organization.
Practice. Once you have built a pretty good script of things to entice a candidate, rehearse the presentation of that script with other hiring managers. The power of any script or list comes through the delivery of them. Body language and vocal tone speak very loudly in an interview setting.
The atmosphere around hiring these days presents a lot of risk in hiring too quickly or for the wrong reasons. Assess that risk both short and long term.
Steve Schumacher is a management consultant, trainer and public speaker with more than 25 years of experience in numerous industries throughout North America, including aggregates operations. He can be reached at [email protected].