How successful is your recruitment process?
06 June 2018

Recruitment – high quality employees – productivity

All managers want to recruit great new employees, build a fantastic team, suffer minimal employment issues, increase productivity and generally have a wonderfully smooth work life?

It’s not a hopeless wish, you know.

OK, employees are humans, not robots so it’s very likely that from time to time you will have problems. Even the most hard-working and diligent people have the occasional hiccough. But if you recruit the right team you’ll find that any problems there are will be far fewer and your life much pleasanter.

Unfortunately, there’s no cast-iron guarantee. Even recruitment companies and HR consultants can make mistakes. I once recruited a person – very intelligent, not doubt of that – but with a penchant for nicking the teaspoons and blocking the loos. It was all a bit odd.

One option is to start with unskilled but good quality recruits and be prepared to train. I have found that very few HR people transitioned comfortably to this business so I started to recruit team members who came from other disciplines but were good raw material. Then I trained them.
It took a while to get them up to speed and was a lot of hard work but the results were spectacular. Just to give you one example; some of my team attended a workshop run by a big London firm of solicitors. All sorts of senior HR people were there. When the firm ran an employment quiz my team were the only ones who got all the answers right. The organisers really couldn’t believe it.

Not everyone likes the recruit for attitude, train for skills route. In one blog I read the author considered that this approach is just a way of trying to recruit young, cheap labour. Well, not in this business, matey. My trainees were well rewarded and progressed quickly. Incidentally, I was very happy to train anyone who wanted to learn, whatever their age or background.

Naturally there is a place for recruiting skilled people too. When you’re talking about big organisational changes and/ or senior roles, you should recruit people with the appropriate skills. You’ll need to invest time on this to recruit the hiring the best obtainable (rather than simply settling for the best available). The time to start recruiting your highly skilled people is now – even if you haven’t got a vacancy.

Make a list ten people who impress you the most and ask them to introduce you to someone who impresses them. Repeat. Build a relationship with this talent pool. Have coffee, get to know them, keep in touch. Then when you do have an opportunity you’ll be able to find the right person with the minimum of fuss and bother.

Building a fantastic high performing team is quite do-able with a little patience, some good processes and planning.

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DISCLAIMER

Although every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information contained in this blog, nothing herein should be construed as giving advice and no responsibility will be taken for inaccuracies or errors.

Copyright © 2024 all rights reserved. You may copy or distribute this blog as long as this copyright notice and full information about contacting the author are attached. The author is Kate Russell of Russell HR Consulting Ltd.