Angela Hausman, PhD March 30, 2021 People often think of marketing as advertising. Period. Well, that’s not even half true. In fact, marketing is a whole lot more than just advertising. Marketing involves the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and place (distribution). Newer concepts of marketing include people as a 5th P or even a 7th P, as shown in the image below. Thus, you must hire the right people for your business is important for achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, which translates into success.
We’ve all encountered less than satisfying interactions with a physical business or online customer service. Maybe the employee didn’t know the answers to your questions or, worse, gave you the wrong answer. Maybe you were in a restaurant and the employee didn’t bring your food hot and fast the way you like it. Maybe you were trying to work through customer service online and found the answers provided by the chatbot were less than satisfactory. These are examples of service failure and when customers experience service failure, they not only consider leaving the business for good but share their dissatisfaction with anyone who will listen.
These scenarios highlight the importance of hiring the right people as employees of your business. With the right people on board, you ensure superior customer service and satisfaction. Not only that but, when you hire the right people, you have the skills and productivity your customers expect and you’re able to provide multiple opportunities to grow your business.
The opposite applies when you make the wrong choices when searching for the right people as part of your recruitment process. So, to ensure you find and hire the right people for your business, consider the following 4 tips. By improving your recruitment process based on these tips, your business has a greater chance of success.
Tips to hire the right people for your business needs
Hiring the right people for your business starts with clearly articulating the needs of the new hire. Consider not only the skills necessary to perform the job but those intangible qualities that make a prospective employee a good fit with the rest of your team. For instance, you need frontline employees that are personable and empathetic to deal with customers and the problems they encounter.
Excellent communication skills shouldn’t be something you add to other skills in crafting the job description. Instead, ensure that new hires, in fact, have good communication skills as part of the interview process. This means avoiding the common job interview that is nothing more than a social call with some standard questions like, “Where do you see yourself in five years?”.
Similarly, eschew the normal office or conference room as the place for an interview. Give the candidate a tour, ask several prospective co-workers to join the candidate for a meal, or even take them out on an adventure to see how they respond to unpredictable situations.
Now, for the 4 tips I mentioned at the beginning of this post.
#1: Choose the right job boards
There are many places where you might advertise your vacancies online, such as Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, and a host of others. But you waste both time and money if you don’t choose wisely because each site charges a fee for posting your job opening and getting too many applications from unqualified people results in a lot of work for your HR team.
Try to avoid generic job sites wherever possible as these sites increase your chances of getting lots of applications from people who are the wrong fit. Instead, advertise on specialist job sites tailored to your particular industry. Candidates with the right skills and experiences are more likely to visit these niche sites first, as they look for employers that are the right fit for their career journeys.
Some job boards offer tools to help with filling your job openings. For instance, you might find job boards offering skill tests that weed out unqualified applicants so that you only get applications from people who possess the skills necessary for the job.
#2: Consider employee referrals
If you include your employees in the recruitment process, you make employees feel valued and improve your chances of finding the right people for your vacancies.
Your employees know your company inside and out and recognize the skills needed for job openings. Similarly, your employees must work with the new hire so they’re in a great position to offer suggestions and refer suitable candidates to you for consideration. Among the optional referrals are people they worked with before, people they know from school or training programs, or members of the community who’ve earned their respect.
#3: Work with recruitment professionals
While there is much you can do within the recruitment process, you do need to factor one thing into the equation: Time! As a business leader, you are understandably very busy, and this has an effect on your hiring success, especially when you’re too small to have an HR team in-house.
When you’re busy, you might find yourself trying to speed up the hiring process by rushing to advertising openings without giving careful thought to necessary qualifications. Or you might hire one of the first few candidates that apply to reduce the time it takes to conduct interviews. While you might still employ the right person, there is the potential for mistakes when you rush into a decision.
So, consider outsourcing the recruitment process to others. Professional recruiters specialize in hiring the right people for your organization and others. They’re specially trained and often have skills testing or other programs to ensure your hiring process is as smooth and successful as possible.
Often professional recruiters are organized around industries to improve their chances of finding the right people for you. Hiring an expert in your industry when looking for a recruiter means you’re more likely to hire the right people for your needs. But if and when you do, be sure to hire specialists in your industry.
#4: Stand out from your competitors
As you would do in all other aspects of your business, do what you can to stand out from your nearest rivals. This might mean paying an SEO specialist to tailor your job advertising, as this improves your chances of ranking higher on search engines when users enter queries reflecting their job search intent. And it might mean making more of an effort to impress the job candidate within the interview process, as they might then favor your company over others they might otherwise consider.
Remember, the goal of the hiring process is to find a good fit between your business and a new hire. Be open and honest during the interview process and ensure that you are finding a new employee who will contribute to your organization far into the future.
Conclusion
Trying to hire the right person for your business is important for your long-term success, so consider each of these suggestions. Your business should experience greater success if you do, and your business will have a better chance to grow.
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