With the current talent pool overloaded, the biggest reason companies are complaining about being unable to find good talent is because they do not know what the job requires. If you don't know what the job requires how will you know when you find a high potential candidate?
If you research through the web you will find a lot of information about recruiting. The trend that you will keep on seeing is the first step of recruiting starts at home. Not necessarily hiring from within but defining the job. What does the job require in order to deliver the key accountabilities and results expected of the job?
This blog entry is a simple walk through the web. Let’s start by looking at About.com, a New York Times Company, and look up recruiting under Human Resources. Here you will find an article bySusan Heathfield.
Look at the very first step of "Recruiting Your Ideal Candidate." The key two sentences I thought were, " Develop a job description that delineates the key responsibilities and outputs of the position. Then, define the behavioral characteristics of the person you feel is your ideal candidate. " In my words, listen to the job and then create the measurements. This is the start of hiring for fit. If you don't believe About.com How about what Samantha Cortez writes in Business Insider and American Express when quoting Bradford Smart, author of the book, "Topgrading: The Proven Hiring And Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance" and president of Smart & Associates.
One of the key takeaways from this article in order to execute better recruiting is the paragraph on Create a Vivid Job Description. The quote I am referring to is: "Job descriptions are so vague that hiring managers and others who will be affected aren't really clear about what they are hiring someone to do and candidates are equally confused, hoping to figure it out once they're on the job. Avoidable, costly mis-hires are the result."
Think about what Lawrence Bossidy, the former COO of GE, said, “I am convinced that nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.” If you believe this then create the foundation of your recruiting by defining what the job requires.
If defining your candidate is the foundation to your recruiting process, how you define your candidate should be in a way that you can measure the candidate as well. No sense in defining a candidate in Celsius if all you have is a ruler to measure them. Yet many companies do this every day.
I read in this last article by Les McKeown, How to Hire Great People Every Time, the best reason for defining your job first. See if you can find it in this article.
Congratulations to all those that found this great nugget of advice everyone in the company should remember:
After all, every new employee you bring in to the business either raises the competence of the organization as a whole (enabling you to grow and prosper) or lowers it (slowing the organization down and imperceptibly dragging it toward decline and failure).
So what are you going to do the next time you are asked to recruit someone?
