Contributed post
At some point in your money making career, if you are veering toward side hustles and freelance work you might be faced with the challenging prospect of recruiting staff.
If you’re in this position then you will need to consider these four vital aspects to ensure you get the certainty you require that you are making a good choice.
After all, recruitment isn’t something you should take lightly, as once someone is contractually employed it can be challenging to let them go – which is why it’s so important to make the right choice, first time, every time.
CLARITY
The most important aspect you need to master when it comes to attracting the right candidate is to first work out what that person looks like. Indeed, getting clarity in this aspect is absolutely fundamental to your success in recruiting the right person for the job, as if you do not know what you are aiming for, then it is harder to pick the right person.
Establishing candidate criteria can be a rather time consuming task that needs to be thought about from all angles, as ultimately, the people in your organisation make a huge difference to everything… from the feeling and culture of the workplace to the tangible output that is produced.
Rather than focus solely on educational or experiential qualifications, it can be useful to think more psychological and emotional terms; for instance, how would the ideal candidate handle a particular situation. How would they respond to adversity, challenge, or criticism.
See, you can have the most gifted person when it comes to their job function, yet if their personality or attitude is not congruent with what you are looking for – it will never gel. There will always be friction. When you hire based on attitude rather than aptitude you are ensuring you create a congruent atmosphere and approach between your team, though, to do this, you must clarify what are the key traits you wish your team to embody.
LEVERAGE TOOLS
There are a number of tools you can leverage and it pays to check out the best recruitment tools before commencing your recruitment journey. For instance, you can use apps like Buffer to schedule social media posts that advertise your vacancies, or Canva to create captivating recruitment adverts.
That’s something some small business owners don’t seem to grasp, at first, the fact that you have to invest in advertising for the right people to find your vacancy. There’s a myth that somehow people will just find out about your vacancy, yet, to recruit the top talent in your field, you need to ensure your opportunities are visible to the right people.
INTERVIEW IN A VARIETY OF WAYS
It’s critically important that you thoroughly interview candidates, perhaps multiple times, and definitely in multiple capacities. For instance, a panel interview brings out a very different skill set and attitude in a person than a group exercise when they don’t think anybody is noticing what they are doing, or are too engaged in the task, to keep their perfect composure.
Richard Branson once hosted a reality TV show where he went in search of an entrepreneur he could mentor, and the format was an elimination show, whereby each episode someone was eliminated from a group of candidates.
In the first episode he put on a disguise, and pretended to be a limo driver, as he wanted to see how each person interacted with someone they didn’t feel was important within the process… after which, he instantly eliminated a number of people.
What this shows is the importance of gaining a holistic view of the candidates character; how he or she interacts with someone they consider to be their superior, or who holds the key to accessing the opportunity they seek is likely to be very different to how they interact with the cleaning lady — yet, how they interact with the cleaner is possibly more indicative of their true character and nature than how they act in an interview situation.
CHECK THEM OUT
It’s amazing how many people hire others without first doing full background checks, and verifying facts which the interviewee relied on to influence the interviewers opinion of them. This includes references – as many times, people will offer references that are not genuine, often having their friend or family member act as a reference posing as someone they are not.
In summary, when looking to attract the right candidate you can’t go far wrong by starting out with a clear picture of what you are looking for, leveraging tools to help automate your recruitment processes in order to free up your time, interview them thoroughly and check them out to ensure everything they are presenting with is an accurate reflection of reality.