Recruiting Tips to Build Your Business
Are you looking for great people? Great companies require regular infusions of great professionals to keep them growing. In this ongoing competition for the best people, success requires 10 percent inspiration (or natural talent) and 90 percent perspiration (following the discipline of the search process). A great search process unfolds in four steps:
1. defining what you want,
2. gathering good prospects,
3. evaluating candidates, and
4. testing the fit of your best candidates.
Skipping steps because your gut tells you a prospect is right for the job is a recipe for disaster. Only a rigourous process will make you a winner in the great people search.
Professional search firms begin with an objective evaluation of the way you do business and the processes and people already in place. If you choose to conduct your own search, you should start the same way. Ask yourself what characteristics are important to you in a co-worker, employee or executive. Go beyond the job description to think about the qualities that make a person successful in working with your customers, suppliers, and employees. The better you understand how your company functions now, the better the chance that you will hire someone who is a great fit.
Your first problem, of course, is knowing how to find your ideal candidates and how to reach them with information about your opportunity. Top recruiters spend much of their time developing a deep, wide network of contacts throughout transportation and logistics. They frequent industry events and talk to everyone they meet in enough detail to develop relationships. As a result, they have easier access to more people in the supply chain. They may not already know the right candidate for your opening, but they probably know someone who knows him or her. They also know how to work their networks to find that someone.
The best recruiters work by referral; when a recruiter calls a potential candidate, he or she has been referred by a mutual acquaintance. This gives the recruiter a great opening to sell the company and the job for which he or she is recruiting. People are much more likely to respond to a call from an acquaintance than they are to answer an advertisement.
If you are fortunate, you have people in your company with many years of industry experience. Such people may be an invaluable resource when you are recruiting. They may know the people you need to hire, or they may have contacts that will know them. Make them aware that you appreciate the value of their networks, and encourage them to help you fill positions.
Be aware, however, that “resident experts” may not have much time to dedicate to a search. Many companies expand their searches with advertisements. Traditionally, job descriptions and advertisements have been written to emphasize the needs of the hiring company. It is important to realize that the great candidates are not as interested in meeting your needs as they are in developing their own careers. They already have jobs: your advertisement needs to catch their attention and motivate them to apply to you.
Typically, advertisements produce either too many candidates or too few. Either many unqualified people respond with applications that take hours to sort, or too few respond to fill the position adequately. This is largely because traditional advertising reaches only the people who are currently unemployed and a small percentage of those who are employed but unhappy. The best candidates do not normally have much time or incentive to read advertisements.
Eventually, however, most companies find candidates to interview. At this point, three important skills make the difference between hiring great people and hiring mistakes. These are: listening, questioning, connecting.
Whether you are hiring a receptionist or a C.E.O., these skills will define your ability to conduct interviews and evaluate candidates.
Listening is the most under-rated skill in business. Great listening means more than sitting quietly while someone else is talking. Listening involves:
For instance, during the first five minutes of an interview you may find that you really like a particular candidate. This may be because you are interviewing a great candidate; or it may be because you are eager to like someone enough so that you can hire and get back to your real work. If you can make yourself aware of your feelings, you can change your questions to test both the candidate and your own responses. At the same time, you will be trying to notice a candidate’s tone and pace of speaking voice, body language, and mannerisms as you move from question to question.
Knowing what questions to ask, how to ask them and how to calibrate responses can take hundreds of interviews to master. In the meantime, you need to be aware that your job during the interview is not to give a sales pitch on the job or your business. Your job is to ask good, tough questions, pacing them so that you allow the candidate the best chance to show you his or her best qualities. At the same time, you need to be asking questions of yourself: questions about the candidate’s qualifications and responses; questions about how this candidate will ‘fit’ in your workplace; questions about how your own state of mind is influencing the interview.
In the end, you should hire the person who has demonstrated the best connections: connections to other people in the industry (you have to check references); connections to other people in your company (use a panel to interview, hire someone referred by a current employee, etc.); connections to the job description (how closely do the candidate’s background and experience match the needs of the job?). When you look at the overview of all these connections, you find the best fit for your hiring needs.
Many companies feel that they should have the staff and resources to make, understand, and evaluate connections throughout the supply chain. That’s not always a reasonable expectation. Good recruiters have great networks because developing great networks is what they do, in the same way that computer programmers write computer programs or controllers manage finances. If you do not have a dedicated search professional on staff, then it is often helpful to work with a search firm.
You can use the same criteria to judge a search firm that you use to judge your candidates: connections in the transport industry; connections to people in your business (through past experience or current interviews) and connections to your criteria for success. A great recruiter will meet with you, think about your corporate culture, and carefully consider whether he or she can help you meet your objectives. By working with you over a period of time (whether once a year or once a month), a recruiter can become a trusted advisor and an expert on finding the supply chain professionals who will drive your company to new success.
Whether you choose to develop this kind of relationship with a recruiter or to develop in-house expertise in hiring, a successful search for great people always begins with a great search process. Evaluate your needs, use personal networks to reach potential candidates, write great ads, conduct interviews, check connections and, above all, respect the time and discipline necessary to making great hires. As cumbersome as it may seem to go through every step, you will be glad you did. Great people are worth the effort.