Employees are a business’s biggest resource and biggest expense so why is their recruitment treated so casually?
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The bad advert
Yesterday I saw a job advert posted by a global digital marketing company. They need to recruit a Marketing Manager to lead a small team, it’s a maternity cover role so it’s going to be very important that the new employee hits the ground running. Unfortunately, the company hadn’t used their marketing expertise to write the job advert,
Under education, the advert asked for “a relevant degree or equivalent experience”. That suggests that this a graduate position but they’ll accept someone with similar experience to a graduate. As this is a temporary line management position in marketing surely the key requirement is for someone with relevant experience to the job so why is the “degree or equivalent” included in the job advert? It’s either because they have a template that includes this in every job advert or, more probably, someone has just reused an advert for a graduate role and not changed the education section.
The job advert was formatted into 2 columns on their website, in a way that made it difficult to read, mainly due to a list of 10 desired skills which included:
and
Out of 10 desired skills (there weren’t any essential skills by the way), only 2 were actually skills, the other 8 were either experience or personal attributes which were overused cliches probably copied from old adverts or the internet.
The whole advert reads as if a junior member of staff was told, “We need an advert for a Marketing Manager to cover XXXX while they are on maternity leave put something together and post it on the website and LinkedIN.”. It certainly doesn’t read as if they’ve thought about their target market and how to attract them.
There wasn’t even a salary, just “Dependant on experience” which puts off 80% of applicants as they want to know they are applying for a job in their salary bracket and the fact that you don’t know what salary to offer means that you don’t really know what you are looking for.
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Plan well, recruit well
Now, I’ve used this #jobadvert as an example but it is not unusual to see adverts like this and the cause is a lack of care about the recruitment process. I have been sent numerous job descriptions with comments such as, “We used this to recruit for this position 3 years ago”, “I wasn’t sure what to put, I think this is about right.”, I’ve even been asked to write the job description for clients because they were too busy to write one themselves and I probably know what Project Managers/Software Developer/Marketing Manager job descriptions should say!
If you are launching a new product or service, you will conduct market research, identify customer need, price points, pain points etc. If you are looking to buy a new product or service you will decide what you need to buy, what it will do for your business, how you will use it, what your budget is, what are essential requirements what are the nice to haves and what are the definite no-nos. This is what you need to do when you are recruiting but you don’t.
Recruitment is treated casually because, all too often, recruitment is seen as a painful, expensive and time consuming process and so pushed to the side, left to chance and ultimately it fails and proves your pre-conceptions right.
If you put the same effort into your recruitment as you do with your product development and marketing, if you take as much care identifying your needs when it comes to hiring a new employee as you do when choosing a new phone provider, your recruitment will become painless, cheaper and quicker.
Your salary bill is probably the biggest bill in your company but without your employees you can’t deliver to your customers, without customers you don’t have an income. With anything else this critical in business, companies will have long term plans, contingency planning, maintenance plans and budgets etc. but staffing is left to chance without contingency planning in case of resignations, retention planning, future hiring strategies in place etc.
The reason that many companies struggle to recruit is that they haven’t planned well, they recruit in emergencies instead of when they have time to choose, they don’t know what they are looking for and where to find them and they don’t have a budget in place.
Plan your #recruitment as well as you plan very other aspect of your business and your recruitment will be a success, you will hire the best candidates, you will retain staff, your employees will be more productive and your business will be more successful.