Focus on Hiring & Engaging, Not Recruiting
We need to attract better talent. The right talent isn’t in my market. It’s too competitive. Other companies have better offerings.
Company leaders say this ALL OF THE TIME. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t at a conference or event where the topic didn’t come up.
This is because aggressive and successful recruiting tactics take time. Putting out an ad and hoping to be found no longer works. Sometimes great people don’t even know they’re looking until an opportunity is proactively brought to them.
Time is the true currency of business. You have to ask yourself what dollar amount is your time worth and are you spending time on activities outside of your core business focus and expertise.
You have to HIRE great people and ENGAGE them. Recruiting is important, but it is time consuming, and that time is better spent on learning how to best hire the right people and even more importantly engaging the employees you have today.
Recruiting
All too often recruiting and hiring get lumped together as the same task, but there are subtle differences in the two.
Recruiting is about identifying people based on their past achievements and discovering their future goals. Recruiting involves reviewing, sourcing, marketing, screening and targeting people who could have potential and then making the determination as to whether or not they align with the organization.
When done correctly, recruiting is a time consuming process. Simply advertising a job and screening 30 people that come in is one way this is done, but that only leads to a company getting the best person out of the 30 who applied, not the best person in the market.
Hiring
Hiring is measuring potential for success and selling potential for greater accomplishment.
Hiring takes less time, but is vastly personal to your business and must be handled with great care. In hiring, you must identify a person’s potential for success in the future and their desire to accomplish great things for your company. This means getting good examples from what they’ve done, understanding their motivations and thought processes and looking at the person holistically, not just as words on a resume.
When hiring, it should be a two-way street. Even if you feel the candidate will be taking the job and that you are going to hire that person, it’s an opportunity to start building their engagement by building their excitement for the role that they’ll be fulfilling and the work that will be done. You know your business better than anyone and your excitement should be contagious.
Engaging
Engaging is cultivating the environment for a person’s potential to reach the accomplishments that drive the company forward.
Employee engagement is key to success for any company as employees who are invested and excited about their work are more productive and happier people. Highly engaged employees are also less likely to be recruited to other companies, meaning you’ll be sending less time finding people to do work and more time actually working.
I truly believe that work is not about what you do or where you go, it’s about what you can accomplish. The process of bringing people into an organization is not to have employees on the payroll to complete tasks, it’s about moving your business forward by accomplishing great things, and having great people who have a desire to accomplish them.
