There are many things that a business needs to get right in order to achieve growth. However, it is the agencies and client-organisations that nail recruitment that end up on a strong path to success. Achieve business growth: follow our recruitment tips.
We know its a truism, but it is still worth saying: you will only achieve business growth by getting recruitment right – quite literally, your business is only as good as the people in it.
Great people delight clients. They innovate to solve problems and come up with new propositions. They take responsibility for motivating and supporting themselves and their colleagues. Ultimately they create business growth.
Yet, we all have had experience of how recruitment is treated as a non-strategic issue in agencies and client-businesses – it’s a chore or a necessary evil, rather than it being one of the key measures to achieve business growth. It can also be a costly activity (both in terms of fees and especially if you get it wrong), but again and again, not enough time and creativity is invested in making sure the recruitment process is geared to being successful.
Moreover, the competition for talent and great people has never been more fierce. Really outstanding candidates who will help you achieve business growth are scarce. The recruitment process must be refined to make sure that when you do meet the right person, you maximize the opportunity of offering them the role you want them to fill.
Recently, we have been supporting a number of our clients in their recruitment. Because of the plans our clients have in place, they need great new people. Or, as a result of the success of their business, they recognize that investing in recruitment will help them achieve even better levels of growth. We have been helping them define and refine their recruitment processes. We have been vetting CV’s and interviewing. We have even been negotiating the pay and benefits. We’ve been doing this, because:
- our clients have asked us to help;
- many of our activities and consultancy projects are underpinned by having great people in the businesses we work for.
These businesses operate across different sectors; pharmaceuticals, financial services and consumer goods, but they all have one thing in common. They have taken a far more focused and strategic approach to their recruitment, because they recognize how it will help them achieve business growth.
Based on our client’s recent experiences and our observations, we have come up with a list of recruitment tips for how to improve your recruitment process. These will give you the best possible chance of securing the best candidates for interview, and ultimately recruiting the great people that will help you achieve business growth.
How to get recruitment right; our recruitment tips
- make sure the job profile and person specification is as tight and specific as possible – don’t regurgitate the same old job specs and company description, and make sure the role is fully fleshed out.
- take the time to sell the role and opportunity, first-off to the recruitment consultants (if you are using them), but also to the candidates when you meet them. An interview is a two-way sales process – you will need to demonstrate why your business is the best place for them to further their careers and meet their needs.
- be responsive. Don’t sit on CV’s and don’t hesitate to provide feedback to candidates – if a business does not give feedback on a CV or interview in less than 24 hours, it looks like it does not care (or that it’s inefficient).
- keep an open-mind about candidates, but don’t compromise. Sometimes a candidate may not offer everything you think you needed, but they bring skills, attitude, approach that your business will still benefit from – be open to that. However, never compromise on quality – if a candidate is not good enough, don’t hire them, however much you need that extra resource. Get a temp in, ask your existing team to take up the slack (and shower them with thanks and benefits if need be), but don’t hire the person who is not good enough. Great people will help you achieve business growth; mediocre ones will just drag you down.
- don’t quibble over money, but don’t pay the earth. Do research and find out what the market rate is. If necessary, pay over that, if the candidate offers your business really great growth potential; a few thousand pounds will be of little consequence in the medium term, if the candidate brings you increased levels of revenue and profit. But if you’ve explained your business and the opportunity to the candidate really well, see if you can get them to negotiate – the commercially astute and ambitious candidates will get that they may have trade off money for the fantastic potential offered by the role.
- Invest the time and resource . We are not pretending that recruitment is anything else other than a time-intensive activity. But it is also one of the most effective ways of ensuring your business achieves the business growth you are targeting. Make sure that senior people in your business are spending time on securing top-talent, in the same way they are expected to find and retain new clients. It really is that key.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any comments on this blog about recruitment tips and its contents, or if you would like to talk to us more about how Client Advocates can help your business increase their revenues and profits – [email protected] 07711344074