Spring Cleaning Your Recruiting

Spring Cleaning Your Recruiting

At 6:28 EDT today, spring arrived! After the recent snowstorms and cold weather, most of us are more than ready to welcome spring. It’s a time of renewal, rebirth, and cleansing of things we accumulated during the winter that we no longer need. I love this quote from William Morris, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Morris inspires us to look at the things in our homes and evaluate whether they are still serving our needs. This also works for your recruiting and hiring practices. Most of us are doing things the same way we have for a very long time. We may have processes that take too long, are inefficient, or even worse, cause our ideal candidates to ignore us.

Do any of your processes cause you stress? If so, think about what causes it. The biggest stress for most small business owners is weeding through hundreds of resumes hoping to find a few qualified candidates.

Most recruiting processes focus on screening out unqualified candidates. You create laundry lists of skills and screen resumes against them. The results are predictable—you miss qualified people who could add value, and the screening process is time-consuming and mind-numbing. Who has time to read hundreds of resumes?

Stop relying on outdated recruiting strategies such as posting a long and boring job description on job boards. The “post and hope” strategy no longer works. Today, it’s about reaching your candidates where they are, instead of where it’s convenient for you.

Here are a few ideas to start your spring cleaning.

Change the way people are finding and applying for your jobs.

Job seekers are increasingly basing their decisions about where they work on online research and interactions. Many candidates ignore boring job ads. Time is at a premium for everyone. This means you have about five to seven seconds to grab someone’s attention.

The first two lines of your job ad are critical. Stop wasting them on boring stuff about your company. Make those two sentences speak to great candidates and draw them in to read more instead of moving on to the next ad.

Put on your marketing hat and figure out what about your company and your jobs will be attractive to the best candidates. What makes your company a great place to work? You can be a great place to work without winning an award. I asked an employee of one of my clients to tell me the best thing about working there. Her answer may surprise you. You might have expected her response to be salary, benefits, or remote work options. Instead, her answer was that she could take her mother on vacation and see her company’s products used in hotels worldwide. That simple statement is recruiting gold! Everyone has this recruiting gold—we just need to identify and access it.

Build relationships with your candidate pool.

People have to feel good about your business. That means remembering that you are dealing with humans who want interaction, not automated responses. Some of the biggest complaints I hear from candidates are that recruiters fail to return phone calls or respond to email. A candidate I recently worked with thanked me for keeping her informed of the status of her application. She stated, “It speaks a lot to you and your commitment, and I really appreciate it.” If you want relationships based on honesty and professionalism in your employees, then you must create that relationship in your recruiting process.

While a personal response to phone calls or emails from everyone who sends you a resume may be impossible, you must communicate with the candidates you have contacted or interviewed. If you need proof, check out these hashtags about recruiting fails:

  • #ihaterecruiters
  • #recruiterspam
  • #candidateexperience

Personality and cultural fit are critical.

I often see small business owners ignoring their culture when they recruit. When you fail to assess whether your candidate’s core values and beliefs match your company’s, you end up on a hiring roller coaster. You are excited to hire that amazingly talented person and then feel let down when he or she causes problems. However, you need more than great technical skills. You must hire for attitude in addition to skill.

Like people, your business has a unique personality or culture. Your business has core values, beliefs, and a unique mission. Your business is different from your competitors’, and when you understand your unique value proposition, you can then use that in your recruiting process to attract people who share your values, beliefs, and mission.

The good news is that you now have clarity and can analyze your recruiting and hiring process and get rid of anything that no longer serves you. If you or someone you know needs some spring cleaning help, call me, send an email, or text MOMENTUM to 480-418-1411 to get more in-depth, step-by-step help for hiring the right people. And, the best part is that it’s FREE!