[VIDEO] Are Your Recruitment Practices Damaging Your Brand?

Although it’s perhaps not an area you’d expect to affect your brand, your recruitment efforts can influence the way people view your business – for better or worse.

In this video, Steph looks at how recruitment can damage your business’s brand when done incorrectly.

View the blog post mentioned in the video by clicking here: “How your recruitment practices could be compromising your brand”.

Transcript

Hi there, I’m Steph from Blues Point and today, I want to ask the question “are your recruitment practices compromising your brand?”

Recruitment can be a real pain for businesses. Everyone’s too busy. They tend to think that recruitment agencies are full of idiots, essentially. It’s something that generally, nobody really wants to get it done.

So quite often we find ourselves asking the question “what is the quickest way to get these vacancies filled?”

And the answer is to send them out to lots of agencies, get them to send as many CVs as possible, and tell them to hurry up.

We don’t really think this is a very good way of doing things.

We have worked like this in the past, against other agencies, and, essentially, you don’t get the best out of them really.

To highlight this, put yourself in the shoes of the best candidate on the market, so the candidate who’s actually right for the role.

They probably get half a dozen calls from half a dozen agencies, all wanting to represent them for the role. The agencies that are calling them are in a terrible hurry, they don’t know anything about the role, they don’t know anything about the company culture.

It’s just a race to submit CVs.

And once that’s done, the candidate usually has a lengthy wait for the interview process to start. By which time, he might be off the market.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself, why would he want to come and work for you when this is how your business is being represented in the market place?

So, the candidate drops out, it’s taken too long, he’s found another job.

You start the process again and go on to repeat every single mistake that you made the first time.

It just sounds like something’s broken really, but this is a genuine account of how a lot of companies treat recruitment.

And we don’t think that’s the best way to do it really.

So what we’d like to do is offer you five tips on how to improve your recruitment processes. And how to make sure that when you actually find the best candidate for the job, they want to come and work for you. And they want to continue working for you as well, which is very important.

Tip #1

So the first tip is: If your recruitment model isn’t working, you need to change it.

So how do you know if it’s not working?

If you’re wasting time interviewing candidates that are not right, or not qualified, then it’s not working.

If you’re constantly having candidates drop out of the process, perhaps because it’s taking too long, it’s not working.

And if you’re struggling to retain people when they start in the business, again, it’s not working.

Something is going wrong.

These are all consequences of the race to send CV when you’re dealing with multiple agencies. And what we would suggest to you is that you work with one recruitment partner and give them time and space to find the right candidates, rather than the candidates who are just available now.

Tip #2

The second point is: don’t select a recruitment partner based on cost.

Why do you think cheap agencies are cheap? It’s because they’re not very good, the service is minimal. They’re not interested in learning about your business and working in partnership with you.

Again, they’re just racing to send CVs and hoping for the best.

So that’s a very important tip.

Tip #3

And the third one is to agree a recruitment plan with your recruitment partner at the start of the process.

So this ensures that everyone involved, including the candidate, knows how long the process is going to take, when the interviews are going to be.

And this will help you to ensure that candidates are not dropping out because they know exactly when things are going to happen.

Transparency prevents drop outs.

Tip #4

And the fourth point is to make sure that you got to an extra effort to impress potential candidates.

So when they attend an interview you need to remember that these are the best people on the market. They’re going to be attending other interviews as well.

You need to make sure you really impress them with how good your business is. Get to know them, show them where they’re going to be sitting, introduce them to team members. Really start to make them feel like they’re part of the team.

And also, remember, even if they don’t get the job it reflects well, when they’re telling their colleagues, that they had a really good interview experience with you.

And that’s very important for your reputation as well.

Tip #5

And the final point is to make that your onboarding process is just as good as your recruitment process.

So when the candidate joins, remember that new starters can be very vulnerable in their first few weeks. Particularly if their former employer hasn’t managed to replace them yet, they’re going to be trying to lure them to come back.

Look after them, sit down together, set some goals, and make them a cheerleader for the brand that you’ve built.

And that’s really important.