10 Tips for Successful Employee Recruitment

Finding the best possible employees who fit into your culture and can contribute to your business is a challenge and an opportunity. Retaining the best employees once you have found them is easy if you do the right things right. The information provided here will help you with successful employee recruitment, which is key to your continued success as a business. Without talented employees, you will not be able to achieve your goals.

These specific actions will help you recruit and retain all the employees and their many talents that you need.

These ten practices will serve you well in your recruitment efforts:

Improve your candidate pool when recruiting employees

Companies that select new employees from candidates who walk in the door or respond to an online ad are missing out on the best candidates. These are usually already working for someone else and may not even be looking for a new job. You need to find better ways to increase the number of your best candidates.

Here are the steps you can take to improve your candidate pool:

• Invest time in building relationships with university placement offices, recruiters and executive search firms.
• Allow your staff to actively participate in professional associations and conferences where they are likely to meet candidates you can successfully court.
• Monitor online job boards for potential candidates who may have resumes online even if they are not currently looking.
• Use professional association websites and magazines to advertise for professionals.
• Search for potential employees on LinkedIn and other social media. This is an important step if you are trying to improve your candidate pool of women and minorities.
• Encourage your employees to refer friends and professional colleagues they may know online to your company.
• Bring your best prospects from all these sources into your company or call them on Zoom to meet them before you need them for a vacancy. Having an established relationship helps with employee recruitment

Note: The key is to build your candidate pool before you need it. These seven practices will serve you well in the recruitment process.

Hire the sure thing when recruiting employees

The authors of "The Human Capital Edge", Bruce N. Pfau and Ira T. Kay, believe that you should hire a person who has done "that exact job, in that exact industry, in that specific business climate, in a company with a very similar culture".

They believe that "past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior" and suggest that this is the strategy you can use to hire winners. They say that you need to hire the candidates who you believe can hit the ground running in your organisation. You cannot afford to take the time to train a candidate who is only possibly successful.

Look at internal candidates first

Offering your current employees opportunities for promotion and lateral entry will boost morale and make your employees feel that their talents, skills and achievements are valued. Always advertise jobs internally and let your staff know if you are also advertising the job externally. Give reasonable deadlines for applications.

Give potential candidates an interview. It is a chance for you to get to know them better. You will learn more about the organisation's goals and needs. Sometimes a good fit is found between your needs and theirs.

Become known as a great employer

Pfau and Kay advocate not only being a great employer, but letting people know that you are a great employer. This is how you build your reputation and your company brand. You want the best potential employees to seek you out because they respect your brand and want to work for you.

For example, Google, which regularly tops Fortune's Best Companies list, told Axios that it received 3.3 million job applications in 2019. This was up from 2.8 million job applications in 2018, an 18% increase from the previous year.

Take a look at your employee practices for retention, motivation, accountability, rewards, recognition, work-life balance flexibility, promotion and involvement. These are your key areas for becoming an employer of choice.

Note: You want your employees to brag that your company is a great place to work. People will believe your employees before they believe what you write in company literature or on your recruiting website.

Involve your employees in the hiring process

There are three ways you can involve your employees in the hiring process.

• Your employees can recommend excellent candidates for your company.
• They can help you review the resumes and qualifications of potential candidates.
• They can help you interview people to assess their potential "fit" in your company.

Companies that do not use their employees to assess potential employees are under-utilizing one of their most important assets. People who participate in the selection process are committed to helping the new employee succeed. It can't go any better for you and the new employee.

Pay better than the competition

Yes, you get what you pay for in the labor market. Take a look at your local job market and see exactly how people in your industry are paid. You want to pay better than average to attract and retain the best candidates. Sounds obvious, doesn't it?

But it isn't. Employers talk every day about how they can get employees cheap. This is bad practice. Have you ever heard, "In the job market, you get what you pay for?" Sure, you may get lucky and attract a person who has golden handcuffs because they are following their spouse or partner to a new community or need your benefits.

Warning: They will resent their pay grade, feel unappreciated and leave you for the first good job offer. The cost of rehiring can be two to three times the person's annual salary. In the labour market, you get what you are willing to pay for.

Use your fringe benefits to your advantage when recruiting employees

Keep your benefits above the industry standard and add new benefits when you can afford to add them. You also need to educate your employees about the cost and value of their fringe benefits so they appreciate how well you are taking care of their needs.

Employees value flexibility and the ability to balance their work with other life tasks, interests and problems. You cannot be an employer of choice if you do not offer a good benefits package that includes standard benefits such as health insurance, retirement plans and dental insurance.

Employees are increasingly looking for cafeteria-style benefit plans where they can balance their choices with those of a working spouse or partner. Pfau and Kay recommend equity and ownership options for every level of employee in your organisation. Consider profit-sharing plans and bonuses that reward the employee for measurable performance and contributions.

Hire the smartest person you can find

In their book, First Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recommend that great managers hire for talent. They believe that successful managers believe, "People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to bring in what's been left out. Try to bring out what was left in. It's hard enough as it is."

If you are looking for someone who can work well with people, you need to hire a person who has the talent to work well with people. It is unlikely that you will be able to train the person to lack talent later. You can try, but then you are not building on the employee's strengths, which 80,000 managers in a Gallup study strongly recommended.

Tip: The recommendation? Hire for strengths; don't expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits and talents. Build on what is great about your new employee in the first place.

Use your website for recruiting

Your website represents your vision, mission, values, goals and products. It is also effective for recruiting employees who experience a resonance with what you state on your website. Your recruiting website should provide insight into the culture and work environment you offer for employees.

You should create a jobs section that describes your available positions and includes information about you and why an interested person should contact your company. A recruitment website is your chance to shine and a highly effective way to attract candidates.

Check references when recruiting employees

The purpose of this section is to keep you out of trouble with the candidates you seek and select and the employees you currently employ. You really need to check references carefully and do background checks.

In the litigious society we live in (don't even ask what percentage of the world's lawyers are based in the US), you need to exhaust every avenue to ensure that the people you hire can get the job done, will contribute to your growth and development, and have not committed any past misdemeanors that could jeopardize your current workforce.

You could even be held liable if you failed to conduct a background check on someone who then assaulted another employee in your workplace.

Warning: Every company has to start somewhere to improve the recruitment, hiring and retention of valued employees. The tactics and opportunities described here are your best bets for recruiting the best employees. These ideas can help your organisation succeed and grow, creating a workplace that meets both your needs and the needs of your potential and current outstanding employees.

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