A Company Is Nothing Without The Right Employees

Most business experts will tell you a company’s success is directly linked to the employees in the organization. Why? Sales don’t happen without people; products don’t get manufactured by themselves; service doesn’t get provided without people.

For there is no company, no organization, no critical mass, without people.

The right people.

In the right seats.

(Thank you, Jim Collins for that concept in your excellent treatise, Good To Great.)

Retaining talented people is critical to your organization – and finding those who fit best within your culture and contribute value to your organization is a challenge. 

Having worked with small, medium, and large-sized businesses, we have seen, and we understand just how important it is to recruit, retain and cultivate great employees. Hiring an employee that isn’t a good fit for your business can cause any number of disruptions, including turning a positive environment into a toxic one.

To help avoid hiring the wrong people, we’ve prepared a few tips that can help before your next candidate search begins.  

Be Proactive with Recruitment

When you select new employees from the pool of people who answer an online job posting, you might be missing out on the best candidates. By being proactive with recruiting and seeking the candidate you believe would fit into your company, the net effect is building better teams. Better teams are the natural result of better players.

Take time to develop relationships with sources of talent, not just job sites, but recruiters and other word-of-mouth resources within industry verticals. Such sources can recommend qualified candidates for open positions.

Also, consider in-house candidates already in your organization for new challenges in new positions, or encourage your current staff members to network and recommend anyone they have professional experience with. It is also valuable to utilize LinkedIn or other online platforms to find candidates that look like good prospects.

Build Your Reputation as A Great Employer

Most companies are concerned with building their brand’s reputation for their products and services towards customers, but it’s also important to build the firm's reputation as a great employer. By doing this, you’ll have the best prospects seeking you out because they want to work for your company. Google, which frequently tops Fortune’s Best Companies list, receives around 3,000,000 job applications per year. 

3 MILLION! 

Ask your happy current employees to write reviews on sites like Glassdoor so anyone seeking out information about your company has positive feedback and will be more inclined to be a part of your organization. Of course, when employees do exit, it's critical to conduct exit interviews to find out why and what can be learned and improved.

Improve Your Interview Process

A study by Leadership IQ found that failures exhibited by new employees typically result from flawed interview processes. The facts are that the job interview process is focused on the technical competence of prospects, when other factors like emotional intelligence, temperament, and motivation are more important to understanding if the person will fit in with the company culture, as culture fit is an enormous determinant of success in the organization. Consider how you can improve your interview process to fully vet each candidate and understand how each one would fit uniquely in your organization - to make sure you’re hiring the best person for the job.

Let’s face it, much of HR and recruitment is a system of gatekeeping designed to exclude candidates by finding misalignment or even just the wrong keywords on a candidate’s resume. It's the wrong approach. In fact, I've seen in dozens of companies that often the best hires came from a completely different industry. No bad habits, no preconceived notions, and people from the outside see things that the ingrained veterans have blindspots on.

Be Competitive with Benefits & Pay

Employers get what they pay for in the job market. Survey your local job market and take a good look at the typical compensation and other benefits the professionals in your industry look for, so that you can craft an attractive offer. Beyond just the salary, many people prioritize the benefits a company is offering them when selecting a new position; keep your benefits above the industry standard and consider new benefits you could offer to differentiate yourself from your competitors. 

If you’re a small organization that can’t keep up with benefits and high salaries, give your prospects other reasons and motivation to want to work for your organization; examples include a flexible work schedule, the chance to work from home, advancement opportunities, bonus and tuition and training plans, e.g. 

The right people will gravitate towards those benefits and you won’t miss out on a great employee. 

And if COVID-19 has shown us anything, it's that great people can be trusted, and the company or organization will be well served to offer them flexibility. In my opinion, one of the greatest takeaways from the pandemic has been that we can all do without office politics, negative and unproductive people distracting the workers, and that what matters is collaboration and results. The fog of BS has been thinned by COVID-19 and it's easier to see which employees are integral to the future of the organization, and which ones aren't.

And, great employees = great company = great results.

Copyright, 2021, Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP and Qorval Partners LLC. All rights reserved.

www.qorval.com