Usually because you didn’t spend long enough upfront thinking about your needs and the reality of your expectations. Extracting, co-ordinating and prioritising cross-business thinking to diagnose the real needs of a job is the first hurdle that most people fall at. To hire successfully and consistently means herding your cats and transforming them into a premier league goal scoring team. It means testing, debating, agreeing and prioritising. It’s not just about throwing a poor recruiter a “bone” of a Job Description – and it’s not a scraped and hashed Job Description from one of your competitors. Time spent upfront saves time down the line. We fix poor hiring habits through simple process.

Spreadsheet and inbox hiring makes collaborating to an agreed hiring goal difficult. Elongated recruiting and interviewing cycles are caused by unstructured, unmanaged, uncoordinated thinking followed by unscalable ‘smatterings’ of hiring activities. It takes strong interpersonal skills to manage the different hiring ideals across a team. It takes experience to positively challenge firmly held beliefs and perceptions that can de-risk a hire.

Without a good process to follow and a tight-brief (or some may say a tight leash!) agencies can quickly become uncontrollable. Without a system to measure their performance, fixing problems is hard. Multiple agencies flinging CVs into hiring manager inboxes can have you running around in circles and if you are tight on salary and have a long shopping list you need to be even more careful or your brand could be dragged across the market and laughed at. The right recruitment agency can be a lifesaver, if you know how and what to brief them on. Exclusivity with the right agency is your secret weapon. Equipping them with the right information is your best ammunition.

We find the problems can lie in multiple areas – and these are best tackled one at a time. It generally starts with the job posting, and the thinking (or rather lack of it) behind the content in the posting. Most candidates can’t find enough attractive information to satisfy their interest and are further disappointed with interviewing experiences. If you are consistently running into problems you need to review your whole approach to hiring. We can help you do that.

Your issues may start in your interview process. Many people interview against the job description and fail to pick up enough clues to confirm a person’s values inevitably leading to a culture mis-match. Onboarding is often an afterthought but poor onboarding can accelerate doubt, lead to people management issues and ultimately drag down productivity.

A Job Description (JD) is an entirely different document from a Job Advertisement – not many people “get” that. A JD has the features and activities that tell a person in more detail what the job is about, where it fits in the organisation, what it’s purpose is. A Job Ad is designed to appeal, attract and draw in the right individual think WIIFM (What’s in it for me). Remember features tell (JD), benefits sell (Job Ad). You can’t do both in one page. To be fair – job boards aren’t great for today’s applicants – so dress up your careers page so when they come looking they like what they see.