Making a recruiting mistake can cost you money, damage relationships with your clients and impact staff moral. Here is a scenario that we often come across and some advice to help you out of this cycle.
You are working hard and your business is going well. Though for some time you have felt that one of your senior employees who brings in a large chunk of revenue is close to leaving. Your fears are confirmed when they walk in and resign.
So the first thing you do is quickly right out a job description and place it on Seek and LinkedIn and the applications roll in. In fact you end up with more than 40 applications, which you think is a good sign that the recruitment process is going well.
The next thing you do is take all of the applications home and review them yourself. You pick the best-looking 10 and then decide that you will interview them over the next week or so.
What you discover is that it actually takes you 5 weeks to interview all 10 because you are trying to fit interviews in and around your busy schedule.
Time is flying, it is now two months and you haven’t filled the role. Your key clients are not being looked after in the way they had been and staff are restless as you indicated you would be filling this roll quickly. And to make matters worse some of candidates you were interested in have now accepted other roles and in one case stayed where they are after receiving a counter offer from their current employer.
So, with all of this going on you recruit the best of what is left. You skip reference checks because your gut feel says they will be okay. You now feel relived that the process is over and you are happy to get back to running and growing your business.
The New Person isn’t Working Out
But, after 8 months you realise that your new senior person just isn’t working out. They can’t really deliver in the way you thought. They don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the team and they seem to upset clients.
Back to the Drawing Board
So you let them go and and back to the drawing board you go. You feel frustrated as you put a lot of work into this recruitment process.
What has this Cost You and Your Business
The actual cost to your business could be substantial if this hire cost you a client and if that client was worth $300K a year to you. There is also the opportunity cost of months spent recruiting versus you actually building your business and the damage to moral when you have the wrong person in a senior role.
How to Avoid This Cycle
We see this a lot and here are three common mistakes that could have been avoided.
Create a Job Brief
Create a Job Brief not just a Job Description. A Job Brief looks beyond the Job Description into areas such as cultural fit, behaviours and demonstrated experience.
Move Quickly in the Recruitment Process
Move through the process quickly. If you take to long there is a real chance you will loose the best candidates as they are in demand.
Conduct Reference Checks
Never skip reference checks. If the reference checks had been done this may have uncovered a gap between what the candidate was saying they could do and what others have experienced.
If you would like to know more about this topic or you would like to suggest a topic for me to write about then please contact me paul@paulgreening.com
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