The First Step in formalizing your recruiting and hiring process is to realize that recruiting of staff is just like trying to market your company to prospective customers except your marketing to a different target market. You have to sell yourself with a message that resonates with them.
Most help wanted ads I read are all about what you as the owner wants, the requirements you demand (most of the time because you’re unwilling or incapable of training), or what the company demands (like long hours and low pay - only kidding…well…maybe not).
What’s missing is very little about what you offer to the prospective staff member who’s reading your want ad that would entice them to learn more and to want to join your winning team.
How is this misdirected approach to marketing for great staff different than marketing for great customers?
It isn’t.
Read Your Help Wanted Ads
A great place to reset your mind about being a great marketer who attracts great staff is to read over your current help wanted ads. But this time, read it as if you had a job already but you were interested in finding out what’s out there in the job market. Different, isn’t it?Once you put on their glasses and see it from their perspective, your ads can be rewritten to attract wonderful people.
Let’s get serious. What are you going to offer them to leave a good job and join your organization? After all, the best employees tend to already be employed so you will need to entice them.
Is it with great wages, a chance for a bonus, health benefits, 401K or something more? If you can’t gather a great list of reasons to join, you need to regroup.
The fact is great employees make you money, and the average or worse employees no matter what you pay them don’t. It’s not an invitation to overpay, but if they’re hired correctly and given great orientation training the wages of a couple dollars more or less shouldn’t matter.
If necessary, raise your selling price anywhere from $2.00 to $5.00/hour and that should cover it. Do the math to make sure it does.
Face it! If you really know what your hourly selling price needs to be, do you think your customers are going to mind a couple of more dollars if in return they get spectacular service from friendly well-trained staff? No, of course not!
What you need is a good help wanted ad written from their perspective in the media that will hit your target audience - just like good marketing does when you seek new customers.
In a Digital World
Today, it’s a digital world. Online resources like www.craigslist.com has been a wonderful place for my clients to run great help wanted ads.Just like one-size marketing doesn’t fit everyone, the same goes for taking a one-size-fits-all approach to recruiting. Some areas of the country still find good results with a well-written help wanted ad running in a good local paper that is read by your target age group and demographics for the type of staff you’re looking for. You can also find success in paying for a limited test run on job sites like www.monster.com, which can attract great candidates. Like all marketing, it demands a testing period and measurement of the results so you can allocate your money accordingly.
If you want to get serious about being in the Recruiting, Hiring and Orienting Process at your company, e-mail me at al@appleseedbusiness.com, and I’ll send you a simple one-page overview outline template for this critical step that all my customers use and find very powerful.