Hiring the right employees is imperative for any business. It's such a struggle to hire anyone in today's competitive candidate market place that businesses often make the costly mistake of 'making do'.
Finding the right match takes a lot of ground work. Take dating for example. If you want a long lasting, harmonious relationship, you need to establish who exactly is right for you and place a well-worded advert on the right dating website which will attract the right match.
The same goes for hiring candidates. On paper, you might have applicants with the right set of skills and experience, but they just don’t ‘feel’ right. You make an appointment and they leave before you know it and you have to start again.
Establishing Your Employer Brand
The key for attracting the right match is communicating your core values and what you have to offer. Your personal, or employer brand. It’s quite simple. Spend time on promoting who you are as a business and why candidates out there should come and work for you. What do you offer? What’s good about working for you? You can get a lot of insight into this, simply by asking existing employees why they like working for you. Advertise these testimonials on your career page on your website, record videos of employees talking about what is great about working for you and post these on social media. Generate a buzz out there about how good an employer you are.
Offering a Range of Benefits
You might not be able to compete with salary, but there are low-cost, no cost benefits you can offer. Enhanced annual leave, flexible working hours, enhanced pension contributions, health cash plans, free meals, employee discounts, social events are just a few examples. Shout about these in your job advert.
Attracting the Right Candidate
Now that you have the candidates’ attention, there are a few things you can do help ensure that you hire the right person that’s the right ‘fit’ and who will commit to you long term. Firstly, work out who exactly you are looking for, not just the skills and experience you need but the personal attributes, the competencies that are aligned with your company values. To give an example, as a business, your main focus is ensuring that all of your customers have an excellent experience so that they buy from you again, and recommend you to others. So, you need to hire someone that goes above and beyond to help others – someone who is customer focused. You need to specify this in your job advert, alongside any other deal breakers.
You have an applicant who meets all the criteria and they state that they are customer focused. Next, you need to test this at interview, by using competency-based interview questions. You ask “Give me an example of a time you have gone the extra mile to help a customer”.
Maintain Your Reputation
There are many text books on the subject of work culture, but it really is this simple: value and respect your employees and ensure that your employees have a really positive experience of working for you – word gets out.