Your people leadership

Your people leadership: The Art of a Good Hire. There is a massive unemployment rate today. Thank you, COVID.

Yet I still see the usual hew and cry about how employers are having a tough time finding good help. That there is a massive shortage of decent employees. And that we need the government to come to our rescue and provide more training.  

As much as my heart feels for all the souls who are currently unemployed, I refuse to believe there is a shortage of decent employees.  

The one thing I do know for sure, is that there is a shortage of executives and business owners who lack the understanding of what makes a good hire. None of us are taught this; none of us are born with this knowledge. I’d like to share one thing I learned through trial and error. 

We know in our heart of hearts, the kind of person we want. Because we know how we run our departments, divisions, businesses. We understand how everyone works, we know our budgets and precisely how much we can spend on people costs, we know how the customers are treated and even how our fellow employees are treated.

We have great places to work! Right? How come we can’t find the right candidates, and why is it such a long, drawn-out process?

Let me contrast something. Right now, still, just about every single advert for any kind of vacancy follows the same format. Title of the position. Reports to. Duties.   Education required. Years of experience needed. This is because just about every single advert gets pumped out of the same sausage machine.  

No imagination. No sense of adventure. No fun. Entirely all boring business. Totally dull.

And most of us hate wading through the tons of sausage-made resumes trying to find the one that might be gold. And when faced with a two-foot stack of resumes, we tend to zero in on the kinds of experience they have, only as a way to differentiate the candidates from one another. Your people leadership …

People leave bosses. People do not leave companies. That is a fact. We the boss.

So people leave US, not the company. That was a hard one for me to learn. Here is one way I changed my hiring practices.

I made the adverts a little bit funny and a little bit cheeky. I decided I would sell the organisation, not the job. I had a slightly different take on the title. (Customer Concierge was always better than Customer Service).  

I was upfront about the company remuneration practices as well as the work ethic we wanted. (Hey, we never pay at the top end of any pay scale. But we do offer a pretty decent benefits plan, we do have bonuses for everyone, and we do allow people to make mistakes. And by the way, we believe helping you add skills to your resume is one of the best ways to help you fulfil your dreams). And I strongly felt identifying the values we held dear, was vital. (This is what we hold sacred. Integrity, persistence, our word when we commit, and a sense of fun no matter how crazy it gets).

Creativity and ingenuity with a big dollop of truthfulness never failed. And it is just one of the drivers behind dropping the employee churn statistic from somewhere north of 30% to less than 1%. Did all this cause me extra work? No. This brought in way more of the kinds of candidates we wanted. The stack of resumes received was much shorter because the candidate endlessly spamming did not occur nearly as frequently. We chose the candidates to see – based on their cover letter.  

Not their resume. Yes, we always looked at the resume. However, we were looking for an attitude. For values first. Because education is not a definer anymore, and experience can be glossed up. But I knew honesty, attitude and values needed to shine the brightest. For me, my team and our company.  

Your People Leadership. Next month, I will share a couple of secrets for great interviews.