Breaking news: Unicorns don’t exist!
Earlier today, I was talking to a client who is recruiting for a new role as part of his expansion plan in his business, and he had just spoken to a recruitment consultant to help fill the position and the consultant gave him some very positive feedback
It is refreshing to find a business owner that has a crystal clear understanding
of what he is looking for from a new hire, and that got me thinking about how often you start a recruiting process without being crystal clear on the role you’re trying to fill.
How often do you start with a vague understanding of some of the things you want them to do and then mash in all of the words that most people put into recruitment adverts like must be very well organised, high levels of attention to detail work independently as part of a team and all that stuff that is frankly really unhelpful and is just a bit of rubbish.
Suppose you want to recruit great people in your business. In that case, you need to understand very, very clearly the specific outcomes and expectations and KPIs that you want that person to fulfill that way; yes, you can brief consultants properly; that way, you can market roles more effectively. But, still, critically, you can use that information to be crystal clear on what you’re looking for in skills and experience.
The trouble is, if you start with a vague idea, you are going to kind of half-arse your recruitment process because you’re going just to be assessing whether that person is a lovely person and whether they can do the job instead of being laser-focused on the specific skills and experience that you are looking for to make sure that you do not miss hire.
The cost of a mis hire is astronomical, something like 14 times salary and think about all the wasted management time and all of the added aggravation and the time lag to fill that vacancy again in the future.
This is just an area that you have to get right. If you are growing as a business, you’re going to have to become an expert at hiring because you’re going to need more people to support the growth of your business, and like I said mis hiring is expensive but, still, it’s also a colossal waste of time.
One final thing: stop looking for unicorns; they don’t exist. If you’re looking for somebody that has high levels of attention to detail, that can analyse data, but at the same time, they must be highly creative and have an eye for design that is completely unrealistic, your job is to get down to the essence of what you are looking for and to be realistic about that and to build a recruitment process that properly assesses for skills, experience and culture fit.
If you’re looking for more free business advice, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”
Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach based in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing any of the tactics from “Mind Your Own Business”.
