Every employee that steps into your business has the potential to be your company’s next game changer. That’s why it’s not only important to hire the best professionals, you also need to evaluate those who align and will contribute positively to the company culture. This recruitment approach is a reciprocal process:
- Candidates should possess the attitude, aptitude, and abilities you’re looking for to fit in at your organization.
- Your company should show applicants how you protect and defend a happy, healthy, wealthy culture.
One of the most effective ways to attract top talent and spark their curiosity is to brand your company culture. We call this Employment Branding. Letting an applicant witness your brand’s guiding principles and values reinforces your recruitment image in the eyes of potential candidates.
The way your recruitment and staffing department gets your employment brand message across is critical. This will be the difference between finding the best fit or the wrong puzzle piece for your vacant role.
“It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” – Roy H. Williams
So, how can you share your employment brand during recruitment? Find out below.
What Is the Right Approach to Recruitment?
Imagine an HVAC company that needs to hire a new Technician to meet current demand. The company’s owner posts a job ad online and gets inundated with tons of applications. He spends hours weeding through them, and then he finally finds a knowledgeable and experienced Tech from the HVAC industry.
A few months later, the company’s owner is in the same predicament, because the first candidate stops showing up for work. This time, he asks a recruitment specialist for help. The specialist suggests integrating the company’s CORE Values and guiding principles into the recruitment process to screen candidates. The owner does this and finds the ideal applicant. Someone who is both qualified but also a good cultural fit for the company. The new candidate is still working for the company today.
The moral of the story is that without the right approach to recruitment, you’re gambling with your reputation, revenue, and sanity. Recruitment is a process that should be approached with attention and care. By advertising your company culture, you attract candidates who are both competent and a suitable match for your business.
For recruiting companies, the right recruitment approach is to hold equal importance to these two factors:
- The attitude of the candidate regarding your company culture
- The aptitude of an applicant to be successful in the role; and
- The ability of an applicant to do the required job.
If you focus on only the ‘skills’ (ability) factor, you risk putting unfit prospects through the recruitment process. This will cost you money, energy, and time. You don’t want that.
Wizard of Sales® is the recruitment specialist who can help you find the best people for your brand. Prospects who will protect and defend your company’s happy, healthy, and wealthy culture. Book a demo.
5 Steps of Recruitment That Attracts the Right People
Step 1: Compliment the prospect
“One of the most powerful tools in your recruitment arsenal is also one of the simplest, most basic parts of being a human being — compliments.” — Ryan Chute
The surprising yet compelling hiring tactic that companies often overlook is providing meaningful and insightful compliments.
No, I am not referring to the interview process itself but rather in the recruitment ad itself. When you learn to give compliments during recruitment, you catch more authentic, genuine, and honest fish.
Let me explain.
How many times have you listed job duties on a recruitment ad only to receive countless applications the next day? Here’s the thing. How do you which applicant stand for and against the same things you do? Wouldn’t you rather have a shortlist of applicants that applied after reading (or listening) to what you believe in? You want to find candidates you can build relationships with. People who will embody your culture, not just tell you what they think you want to hear.
In your recruitment ad, don’t make a detailed list of the duties and responsibilities for the position. Instead, describe in detail the actions and behaviors that person is inclined to demonstrate to be successful at your company.
Why?
Because the person who self-identifies with the person you’re describing will be a far better fit than the person who checks the boxes on a list of duties at the highest pay. The right people will self-select and willingly step into your gravity well to be a part of something greater than themselves.
Notice the subtle difference?
Like you, an applicant is also searching for a company that makes them feel valued and important. Every candidate wants to be a part of something worthwhile. Not a company that sees them as a stepping stone to profitability. A company that treats them as an esteemed member of the tribe. One that appreciates them for who they are and what they do.
When you frame your recruitment ad in this manner, you’ll be surprised by how refined your application list will look. It now falls on you to screen them to find the perfect applicant.
Step 2: Identify with potential prospects
If you’re trying to hire the top talent that align with your culture, set the bar. However, you don’t want a bar too low, especially if you’re keen to acquire the cream of the crop. Finding your ideal prospects goes beyond assessing their skills, competence, and intelligence. It’s about knowing who is aligned with your principles and CORE values.
Most Millennials see the alignment of vision, principles, and values with their company as an important factor when finding work. According to CNBC, 86% of Millenials are willing to take a pay cut to align with a shared purpose. LinkedIn officer Nina McQueen also said that people’s work and lives are being more intertwined by the hour. For this reason, she added that working for companies that share their employee’s values is also becoming increasingly important.
Contrary to millennials, only 9% of Baby Boomers would bother taking a pay cut for values. There’s just one problem: Baby Boomers are now leaving their HVAC jobs in what we call the Great Resignation. In other words, Baby Boomers out, Millennials in. The workplace is now dominated and saturated by younger and more robust Millennials and Gen Z’s. These are people who value culture more than money.
This means you should give your ideal candidate a taste of your culture if you want their utmost commitment. You can do this through the following:
- Highlight your principles, values, and purpose
- Publically talk about what you stand for and what you stand against
- Let your communication reflect your values and beliefs
These have a way of creating a high barrier to entry for people who don’t align with your beliefs. Nonetheless, you will start to recognize the ideal candidate when they apply. That’s how you know their attitude and beliefs align with yours. These are the candidates you want.
Step 3: Connect and interact
It’s no secret that people crave communication. In the same manner that no one wants to be ghosted, applicants want to know where they stand in your recruitment process.
Citing a Career Builder survey, 84% of talent expect an email that acknowledges their application. The problem is this number doesn’t coincide with employers. Only 26% of managers and employers proactively inform candidates of their progress in the recruitment process.
For a residential home service business that upholds communication and transparency in the workplace, this gives the company a bad rap. If you want to attract prospects with your culture, you must adhere to your own principles. This applies even when connecting and interacting with talent.
It makes perfect sense for talent to feel curious about where they’re at in the recruitment process. However, most business owners don’t know that the hiring experience also affects a person’s buying decisions. The study added that 58% are less likely to buy products/services from companies that didn’t respond to their application. Moreover, the percentage spikes to 65% for people who didn’t hear back from an interview.
This isn’t retaliation for not hiring them. Think of it as retribution for not reaching out. It’s common decency to do so whether you bear positive or negative news.
Always remember that the recruitment process doesn’t end with an applicant sending in their application. Between the frame of sending an application and hiring, prospective talent can still choose to disengage with your business. That said, it’s critical to extend your value-sharing endeavors when you reach out, interview and even onboard the new employees. After all, employee retention and candidate attraction are two very different things.
With that in mind, you must ensure that your tone of voice and manner of communication is uniform. It should be consistent with the culture you so wish to uphold. Any subtleties or tone shifting observed throughout this process can be off-putting to candidates. That’s why everyone within your business structure must speak the same language. Be it the CEO, Techs, or administrative team.
Your workplace culture should be transforming. It must emanate throughout your people.
Step 4: Sort your talent
There’s one key element that builds a relationship: the alignment of values.
Yes, communication matters, but this is mostly factored in after a relationship is built. In other words, communication is what strengthens a relationship, not what creates it.
Set your standards and disclose your values, principles, and culture in your recruitment ad. This will be the minimum standard to entry which the right people will align with naturally. How do you weed out those that applied for the heck of it from the deserving ones? The candidates that are most likely to be genuinely, perpetually invested in your values?
Simple. Use the right psychometrics tools.
We use a tool at Wizard of Sales® that tells you not only how the person best fits with the job you need them to do successfully, but also how they will fit in your culture. If you are looking for people who follow a process impeccably, it would be nice to invite those candidates in first. If you want someone who is really good at consistently answering phones day in and day out, you’d rather talk with them first.
The recruitment process has been broken for literally centuries and with the shift in technology, you are now able to save many hundreds of hours each year in choosing who to spend time with and who to lose.
This technology allows you dissect your talent, unmask your prospects, and reveal what they hide within BEFORE you have 3 interviews with them, draw up an employment contract, do drug testing and background checks, and check their references. Only to find out they are going to stand around waiting for you to manage them, then complaint that they don’t get paid enough and leave. Exhausting.
Step 5: Attract applicants with your company’s culture
Step 5: Attract applicants with your company’s cultureHiring a new employee to take up the mantle of a vacancy is cumbersome. The recruitment process costs a lot of money, energy, and time.
Writing the recruitment ad. Filtering out applicants. Interview upon interview. Negotiating the terms. Drug tests. Reference checks. Background checks. Driving records. Ghosting. The more time you spend on each touchpoint, the more money, energy, and time your team burns. This includes all efforts to compensate for the additional workload left by the position. It costs a lot of money to secure a new hire. And that’s all before you ever start training them.
Hiring the wrong person will cost you a whole lot more, though. The wrong hire will cost you at least double the amount of money, energy, and time you initially spent recruiting them.
By advertising your company’s culture, you cut down on all the costs to attract and hire the right people. Your company culture should be infused into every touchpoint of your recruitment program. Doing this will attract people who find your company values, principles, culture, and beliefs desirable.
Every channel, policy, process, plan, and team member representing your business should reflect the culture you want candidates to embrace.
“A kickass culture attracts kickass people. Kickass people perpetuate a kickass culture.”
—Ryan Chute
With that in mind, use your culture as the primary lead magnet for prospects. When candidates are cut from the same cloth as you, you know they’re the best ones to hire.
Why You Need To Hire More Women for Home Services Jobs?
Did you know that women make up only 1 out of every 100 people in trade jobs? In total, they make up only 2.5% of all tradespeople. That’s a very low number. Your residential home service business could use more women.
Let me explain.
Only 23% of executive staff are females but 71.8% make up office positions. The reason less women are in trades is because they are not naturally attracted to the type of work the trades offer. For those brave souls who step into the trades, many of them will be poorly treated. However, the function of women in construction management has significantly increased between 2018 and 2020, and this number keeps rising. With more attention paid to culture, business can and will attract more incredibly talented candidates.
The women holding trade positions are breaking boundaries and inspiring younger women to follow in their steel-toed footsteps. Furthermore, women don’t suffer from the same stigmas that men do when selling. This is particularly valuable for residential home services where revenue performance is essential from field workers.
What else does this mean?
In an economy where there are tight labor markets for skilled trades, hiring more women will close this gap. Growing your talent pool beyond men opens your company’s doors to the other fifty percent of the population.
A more diverse workplace invites more perspectives. More perspectives denote more possible solutions to problems. It begins with embracing and welcoming women into the trades. Your residential home service business will learn a lot from them.
Otherwise, limiting your prospects only limits the extent of your business’s growth.
A game-changing culture should build bridges and break barriers. That’s the key if you want to attract top talent. Keep in mind that every employee, men or women alike, have the potential to propel your business to success.
Do You Have The Right Recruitment Approach?
Do You Have The Right Recruitment Approach?The best recruitment approach starts and ends with culture as the strategy. Your culture is meant to disrupt the pool of talent. It must weed out the multitude of applicants that don’t share your values. Your culture will retain the best people who will live out your values and guiding principles every day.
Are you following the right recruitment process?
When you set your culture as the standard bar, you will find the finest people for the job. Those who will uphold your company’s happy, healthy, and wealthy culture. Wizard of Sales® is the recruitment specialist you need to make this dream a reality. Book a call.
“Culture doesn’t eat strategy for breakfast. Culture is the strategy.”
— Ryan Chute