Following last week’s post about how “Defining Your Ideal Customer Boost Profits,” I now want to turn to another very important consideration: your ideal employee.
Research shows that almost 75% of people have left a job because of a cultural mismatch. Given the costs of replacing people can add up to as much as 4x their annual package, this is a massive cost to the business. And bear in mind, too, the lost productivity before the person leaves due to their demotivation – in this article I pointed to the research that just 15% of employees say they’re working at the full potential.
So, it’s clear that the costs to business of poor hiring choices are enormous.
We all recognise just how tough hiring can be – I’ve certainly made some bad choices in the past, from both a hiring perspective and finding myself in a role where I didn’t really ‘fit.’ So, how can we reduce the risk, and costs, associated with hiring?
The avatar concept covered in last week’s post can be applied, not just to your customers, but to your staff, too. Think first about what your business is about, and who your customers are; draw, here, upon your Ideal Customer Avatar. Think, too, about your company culture, look at your core values and how these are translated in the workplace.
This will give you a starting point – what sort of person will identify best with your business and those customers? Recognise, too, the importance of diversity in your business, but diversity in a way that complements your business, rather than disrupts it and makes the new hire and others uncomfortable.
Now, for different roles within your business, think about the hard and soft skills a successful employee would have: hard skills being things like experience, education, certification and the like; soft skills covering areas such as communication and interpersonal skills, organizational and problem-solving ones, and so on.
Tie this all back to the job description of the role at this point – does it make sense? You might even want to change elements of the job description now you’ve fleshed out the candidate avatar.
Creating these hiring avatars will really help you focus your advertising and briefs to recruiters, reducing the number of poor-fit candidates and increasing the likelihood of success for your business and the candidate. But remember, these are not a do-once-and-forget thing – as your business grows and evolves, so, too, will the profile of your ideal employees, so you will need to revisit them at least annually and update as necessary.
Of course, while very valuable, this is only one part of successful hiring – complement it with building up a network of people you’d want to work with you in your business so that when that vacancy arises you have a ‘warm pool’ to work with rather than embarking on a hurried search and, as often happens, taking the best fit at that time. I’ll cover this in a later post.
In the meantime, work on your ideal employee avatars for the various roles – you’ll be pleased you did.
#BusinessFitness #Excellence #Growth #JobSatisfaction #Leadership #Motivation #People #Productivity #Recruitment #Teams
Other related posts that might be of interest include:
- Are You Paying For Productivity or Wasted Time?
- Are Staff Leaving Because of Bad Management?
- “Excellence is Not a Skill. It is an Attitude.” – Ralph Marston
- “Train people well enough so they can leave. Treat them well enough so they don’t have to.” – Sir Richard Branson
- “Hire Character. Train Skill.” – Peter Schutz
- “It’s Monday… time to motivate and make dreams and goals happen. Let’s go!” – Heather Stillufsen
- You’re Driving, But Does Everyone Know The Destination?
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