How to get recruitment right first time – part 2

Growing your business with the right people can be a challenge, especially for early stage and high growth businesses. For many, finding the right people often starts with a wish list of characteristics, behaviours, skills and experience before soon realising that they just can’t afford their ideal candidate. They end up employing a person with perhaps 6 or 7 out of 10 from their perfect wish list. It’s not that the person is any less valuable, it’s simply because the employer hasn’t given enough thought to what they actually need. In this article, I’m going to explore some of the key points to think more closely about to help you get recruitment right first time. Do please also read part 1 .

This article is all about finding and hiring the best people for your company. It’s a mixture of ideas because it’s made up of my own experiences in finding the right people for my own businesses. What works, what doesn’t, and the seismic shift in expectations that has occurred over the last few years.

There’s one key point I think needs clarifying before we move on, and that is the operational and cultural expectations of those you are recruiting. Here’s why – when people move from a larger organisation to a smaller one, they sometimes do so because they want to feel more valued. The challenge in this situation is they will be used to a way of working that suits a larger organisation but not a smaller one. Helping them to shift and re-align to your way of working should be something you recognise and address. Similarly, when someone moves from a smaller organisation to a larger one, it’s sometimes because they are looking for a level of career progression not available in the smaller organisation. As well as the operational challenge noted above, there will be change in organisational culture your new employee hasn’t experienced before which again, must be addressed early on to manage expectations and seamlessly integrate your new team member. Both these points are especially true for younger and high growth organisations, where the recruitment pool tends to be from the younger generations.

It's different for more established organisations.

Most people who are leading more established organisations would like to carry on working the way they have traditionally done so over the last 20 years, but the cultural and operational expectations of your recruitment pool have changed dramatically, even more so since the global pandemic of 2020/1. People want to work remotely, they want to work from home, and they don't want to be in the office more than a couple of days a week, if at all. It's enormously difficult to attract, onboard, train and develop a team of people when there’s no one regular or daily point of contact that brings the whole team together. How do you train and mentor somebody when you're based in London, and the person you're talking to is in Europe or even further afield. That has been a major change and a major challenge, and I don't believe it will last successfully. More and more of the more established and larger organisations are finding it more difficult to build cultures, and to mentor, lead and motivate teams of people when they don't see and meet them in person.

Managing people remotely is relatively straightforward when you already know them. Recruiting, mentoring, training, leading and motivating people is next to impossible when you’re not starting from a place where those involved have developed a (professionally) personal connection and relationship.

From a leader’s point of view, especially in early-stage businesses where money is tight, what should you do if you're looking to grow a high performing team. What are some of the mistakes leaders make, and what should you focus on and do first.

Firstly, most people don't put enough effort and thought into the recruitment process itself. Most people who are asked to put a job spec together, especially a commercially focused role, will start by creating a tick list of the skills, strengths and attributes of the person they think they should be looking for. Because they haven’t thought it through and they haven’t considered whether they can actually get all those qualities in one person, and if they could, could they afford them, they end up settling for a 6 or 7 out of 10 from their wish list. I’ve learned that building a high performing team starts with clearly defining the role, both now and how the role will grow into the future. Think about how you will go about finding the right person that matches the role that exists in the future and recruit someone that will grow into that role, both operationally and culturally. Stop recruiting for vacancies now, and start recruiting for the future. Work with an HR company, a recruitment company and a mentor who’s been on the same journey.

Time and time again, I’ve seen leaders trying to recruit from their wish list without taking the advice of professionals early enough to get quality people, have proper profiles and specifications written, and be realistic about what they are looking for. Not just that, but also making sure that they can not only afford those people but can attract them. I have often sat in with my clients when they are reviewing candidates, selecting a short list for interview, then asking ‘now you have your candidates, how are you going to attract them to join you?’

From what I see, most employers are still trying to balance the best skills and knowledge against a budget they can afford, without realising that finding the right people is as much about the candidate choosing them as them choosing the candidate. I’ve talked about the importance of building a recruitment pipeline in the same way as you do a sales pipeline here . The concept being that you invest in your sales pipeline and process so do the same for your recruitment pipeline and process. You can never grow a business with the wrong customers, and you can never grow a business with the wrong people.

Have you ever wasted time and money recruiting, only for that person to leave within a few months? Perhaps it’s because you hadn’t thought it through thoroughly enough.

The number of times I've seen an organisation hire the wrong person and waste 3/6/9 months because they didn't think it through properly in the first place is shocking. That's an expensive mistake to make, not just as a cost in time and money to the business, but it’s expensive culturally within their team, perhaps even expensive in terms of customer relations.

What’s the most disastrous mistake I’ve seen?

That’s easy to answer – employing a friend and fitting the job role round them. When I say it out loud, it’s laughable, but people still do it! I’m not saying never employ your friends, of course not, but if you do, do it by thinking it through thoroughly with a full job specification and role description. More importantly, think more about the future than what you think you need right now.

Jack has a business employing 22 people, it’s a b2b service business in a high growth industry. As we’ve explored already, finding the right people fast enough can be challenging so Jack’s answer was to reach out to his network and talk with his friends and colleagues. He even used the LinkedIn badge ‘hiring’. Needless to say, he received a great many enquiries and Jack thought, ‘look at all these candidates, I’ll be sure to find the right person here.’ As he went through them, he found less and less had what he thought he needed. Berating his experience to his friends, one of them said, ‘don’t worry Jack, I’ll come work for you’.

Chris started work as Jack’s operations manager in February 2022 and they both got on like a house on fire. Jack knew he was beginning to find it difficult to increase productivity through Chris, and Chris managed the team’s productivity through meetings and agenda’s rather than leadership.

It's easy to highlight these shortcomings in hindsight and all seemed fine until Jack came to work one day to find a resignation from Rachel. Rachel is one of Jack's longest serving employees and one of the key members of the team. What we subsequently discovered was that Rachel was finding it increasingly difficult, not just to cope with Chris’s management style, but also the seemingly flippant way Jack and Chris interacted, simply because they were such good friends. Who was at fault, well perhaps both Jack and Chris. Jack because he hadn't thought through what he needed his operations manager to be, perhaps thinking that Chris is a great guy and therefor will be good at the job. Chris because he hadn't had the opportunity to understand the role completely, what Jack's expectations were and the importance of professional conduct.

When cultural excellence is challenged, the best people leave first. See people leave people .

?Jacks lesson – don’t skip steps in your recruitment process, even for a friend or colleague.

Jack and Chris are still working together having learned from their mistakes, sadly Rachel has moved on.

My hard-learned lesson was this – don’t risk the future of your business by settling for just some of your ideal candidate qualities, think about your vision and the future of the business, not just what’s here now. With a focus on the future, you will be able to create a thoroughly thought through role description which is no longer simply a wish list but a facts list, and get some help to do it. This alone will help you take a massive step forward in attracting and retaining the right people.

Let’s explore the role compensation has in recruitment.

Traditionally most organisations, especially early stage, feel like they’re caught between a rock and a hard place. They want the highest quality people for the lowest possible price. In recent years there’s begun a shift towards additional forms of compensation, employee benefits packages for example. In addition to asking ‘what’s the role’, ‘who will I be working with’, and ‘who will I report to’, candidates are asking about the package not just the salary. Perhaps it’s part ownership, health and wellness benefits, discount schemes, etc.

I think most businesses now offer some sort of care package or employee benefits package. By far the one that interests me the most is the concept of part ownership or shared ownership. As a way to attract the right people and retain them, offering a stake in the organisation and therefore the future success of what is now their organisation, can create a very strong productivity incentive and be naturally motivational. How that might be structured in your organisation depends entirely on the size and set up you are building, but I’ve found this idea to be particularly attractive to the right people. Part ownership or stakeholder ownership is not a new idea, it's common practise in the legal and financial industries, so why not in your organisation too.

Now you have your shortlist, what’s next.

Let's imagine you've come up with a shortlist of three, four or five really excellent candidates that meet the brief (as described above). What’s the best way to go through and assess those candidates and attract the best one. I’ve found that it's vital to have a good process and to follow that with every candidate that you bring through.

Firstly, I would recommend that you adopt some sort of psychometric profiling, not as a way to choose or exclude candidates, but as a way to understand how to best align them in your organisation. Understanding how people work and how they work with others is key to integrating them fully into your organisation. I profile everyone that comes into my businesses, and I do it to maximise my knowledge and information about those people, and it helps me to ask better questions. I use them at the second or third interview because it gives us a really good understanding of what their drivers are and which team they're best suited to. If you've got someone who's strongly analytical and process oriented, then you'll engage them with more technical tasks. If they're very strong in terms of emotional intelligence, then you may find them better suited to customer facing activities. Please remember, this is about helping your recruits feel engaged and comfortable in their role, and fully integrated into your team. So, first interview, psychometric profile, second interview, third interview.

The next thing I do, particularly if they're going to be responsible for communicating a message about the company, which includes any customer facing role, is to give them some kind of presentation to do so that you know that they can actually present, rather than fall over at the last hurdle or turn into a quivering mess in front of people. This is often delivered as part of the third interview. On occasion, depending on the role, I’ve also asked some of their colleagues to attend too.

Next, I get them into a social environment, by taking them out for lunch or arranging a small social gathering with colleagues, so I know how they behave. One of my clients recently chose not to make a job offer because the person was just a little inappropriate in a social environment and with potential colleagues to feel that person was the right person to uphold the organisation’s culture both internally and externally. I’m sure you can see how behaviour affects culture; I would rather know now than when it’s potentially too late.

A word about artificial intelligence (AI)

If your recruitment process is just about filtering CV’s, or you’re working from a database, or if you’re using LinkedIn or job boards to find candidates, AI can do that. Yes, you’ll be able to find people, but are they the right people that will engage and stay with you because they feel part of something. At the core of every organisation are people and their relationships.

I can’t predict the future, what I do know now is that AI can’t build relationships and can never replace the human interaction between people talking with people. On the point of remote working, how can you have a cup of coffee with a colleague if you’re not around them. How do you ask about taking Thursday afternoon off when the person you ask might be having the worst day possible and they’re grumpy and angry? How do you pick your moments when you’re not around the people that matter.

It's not that I’m not a fan of AI, I do believe it has a place, more about AI in business here , we must remember that it’s a tool. In terms of recruitment, there will never be a way to replace the opportunity to look someone in the eye and shake their hand. And, as discussed already, mentoring, training, developing and leading people is just not possible if you’ve never met in person.

Let’s summarise with these closing points.

1. Clearly define the type of person you want, not just for now, but into the future and get help to do it.
2. Have a process that you follow no matter the candidate.
3. Use psychometric profiling to align recruits, not exclude them.
4. Get them to deliver a short presentation or skills assessment.
5. Check behaviour in a social environment and include your team.
6. Think about a compensation package that goes beyond what everyone else does.

?Finally remember, the culture of your organisation is at stake. It’s not just about growing your team and scaling your business; it’s about creating something that lives and thrives beyond your tenure.

If you’d like a chat about improving your recruitment strategy, drop me a line here .