Let’s dive into how you make the right recruitment decisions and save a lot of heartaches later because let’s be honest; you will have a lot less low performers if you don’t make bad recruitment decisions!
Look for 'fit' and attitude.
When we go into hiring, we only look for skills and experience ‘we need them to be qualified at AAT’, ‘we need them to have their ACCA or part-qualified.
Those are the first things you think about when you’re hiring a new member of staff, right?
Too often the first few things we think about is the skills and experience. We don’t think about what is the fit we need, what is the attitude we need.
It doesn’t mean that you have to be precise as: ‘Oh, they’ve got to be this, this, and this’. But at a subconscious level, we want staff members that are aligned in terms of values.
For example, the values of our business are loyalty and integrity. We use them a lot in our business. So we need to make sure we ask potential employees about these to ensure they are a good fit for our business.
Avoid being swayed by these factors.
Interestingly, when we come to make recruitment decisions, we often go through this process: ‘Oh, someone’s left, we have to replace them exactly’. Have you seen that before? ‘I’ve lost a client manager, so I need another client manager.’ Sounds familiar?
The first thing you’ve got to do is go ‘well, what do I really need?’
I now remember a former client. She brought in this client-champion-admin-type face of the business, and they deliberately didn’t go for an accountant, they went for somebody that was a real people person.
Now, it didn’t work out because he had some medical issues that meant that he was incapable of coming to work. And the first thing they did in that practice was they went: ‘Well, it didn’t work out because they weren’t an accountant and so we’ve got to have an AAT level 4 in that role.’
But there was nothing to do with whether you had an AAT level 4, and it was the fact that he had a medical condition that he lied about. Often we go all ‘it didn’t work out, so we have to have the exact opposite.’
Also, one of the things we have to realise is that often an individual’s strengths become their weaknesses, and as the leader of the business has to give some direction on how those greatest strengths are used.
My greatest strength is my strategic thinking, but that means my weakest strength is the attention to detail in the here and now. So many times, I need to say “look, I can move quickly, to cross the situation, to move ahead. But I understand that I can miss some details in certain circumstances.
So we have to remember when it comes to getting that recruitment decision right to create that overly detailed job description.
Too often than not, we have a very vague job description. We need to make sure that we’re including all the details.