Are You Making This Recruitment Mistake?

To turn the Vision (World Cup Victory) into Reality (The Cup), Macqueen knew he needed the right players so he and his assistant coaches used two criteria to achieve this united purpose:

1. Pick players who were in form AND

2. Players ideal for each position

So do you have staff who are in form (performing their roles well and following your systems) or are there some behaviours which need to be addressed?

And do you have staff in their ideal positions so they're performing in their sweet spot at least 80% of the time?

If we'd put Larkham in place and he didn't have the skills we required, it would have affected everyone around him, just as it does in a business.

As it turned out, Larkham (by changing him to flyhalf in the Wallabies from his regular position of fullback in the Brumbies) did have the right skills and the whole team benefited from that.

When you're clear on the Vision; and what knowledge, skills and abilities you need to achieve it, then recruiting the WHO for your Dream Team becomes easier.

But unfortunately, too often, small businesses recruit for a warm body to fill a spot rather than actually stopping and spending the time to truly determine the person you need for each position.

And once you've worked this out, then it's also critical to determine what that competent person actually looks like, sounds like etc to ensure they also fit into the team culture at your small business.

Because culture match is just as important as skills match – just ask anyone who's had to let someone go because they caused problems with the rest of the team, with customers and with Management.

And when I ask Management why they didn't see this at the recruitment or induction stage, the honest answer is 'because we didn't value the recruitment, induction and probation phase of employment'.

Which means they didn't put enough time and energy into it upfront and paid for it later.

Remember:

Recruitment, induction and the probation period is the opportunity for you to check out your new star recruit, as well as them checking you out, to make sure your business is a right fit for them.

But you can't make an informed judgment about this if you don't test people and check in at regular intervals to ensure everything is OK.

I've worked for over 25 years with registered training organisations and it always astounds me when RTO Leaders tell me that as part of the recruitment process, they didn't have a trainer deliver a presentation to them or test a potential administration person's skills in data entry and using the student management system their resume stated they were highly skilled in using.

And they then wonder why there are problems down the track!