Building a winning team
How can you create your winning team by recruiting the best people? Every business we coach will need to recruit at some point. Why? Because a business is a commercial, profitable enterprise, that can work with OR without you. If you don’t have a team, then it cannot work without you. Recruitment is crucial, and it is not easy.
However, how do you find the right people? What do you think is the success rate of people hiring the right person? It is at best 50/50, even for bigger and more established firm. What is the risk of bringing in the wrong person? Potentially huge – reduced customer service, someone who will bring the team down with a toxic culture… some estimates say that the cost is around 15 times that person’s monthly salary. One client of ours hired the wrong person and lost 5 members of her team of 12 in a single month! Even several months later, the business is still recovering from the loss of business.
The importance of the person
One of our mantras is this equation:
BE x DO = HAVE
If you want to have something, you need to think about who you need to be and what you need to do to achieve that. Applied to how to do recruitment well, you want to have the right person, to do the right dob… but who do you want them to be? Who do you need to be to find them, and what do you need to do to be able to find out if they are right for you?
Before going a little deeper, just stop for a moment of reflection. What key thoughts and emotions arise when you consider recruitment? Write down your answers. Here are some of the ones proffered in today’s ActionCLUB session:
- Dread?
- Stress?
- Worry and trepidation?
- Confusion?
- Time wasting?
- A liability and a drain on resources?
- Exciting?
- Positive signs of business growth?
Recruit-o-phobia?
People are often mostly worried about the cost of hiring, and ensuring there is consistent revenue coming in to cover the cost of the member of staff. There is a salary of course, but all the other costs are often unseen (accounting, pensions, insurances…). Many business owners underestimate the cost of hiring, and this money fear is a real stumbling block for many. We need to eradicate this fear, because much like marketing is an investment that should return itself, so should a member of the team. If they aren’t covering their own salary, then you’ve got a bad employee!
How much money should you put aside before hiring to ensure you can hire? A safe mechanism is 3 months of the salary, to guarantee that you can at least see them through their probation period. Start saving this money at the point when you start thinking about hiring: save it in a separate account and ringfence it.
Being overcautious to recruit is a concern, as it reflects a fair amount on your mindset. There is a lead time for being productive, and so the sooner you can start to get your Reticular Activating System (RAS) set on growing your team, the better.
The process of recruitment
In today’s ActionCLUB we dived deep into each step of this process, and it is worth remembering that it is indeed a process. Much like anything else in your business, it should be a specific step-by-step process that determines how you do it, so it can be repeated consistently.
There was far too much discussed and covered in today’s session for a single blog, but I’d be happy to spend an hour or two with anyone wishing to learn more about the tried-and-tested process for recruitment that we know of from the ActionCOACH system.
Here are a few of the major points that came out from our discussion in and around the broader topic:
- We are currently in very much a candidate market – and if you can’t offer a fair salary then you are either going to get a poor team member, or someone that won’t stay for long.
- Why not write down who your next hire is going to be? What role are they going to take in the business? When are you going to begin needing them? What do you need to do now to get prepared for them to start? What is the KPI that you will require of them when they start?
- How much time do you think a member of your team will be productive for in the average week? You will lose half a day a week at least to annual leave, but then many sectors have travel time, time for correcting mistakes / revisits to sites… so even at best you can expect a maximum of 80% of their time being revenue generating.
- NEVER use a Job Description as the Job Advert! You need to think “marketing” when you advertise the post. Focus on the persona of your ideal candidate, and needs to be specific and upbeat, with any information that is not absolutely necessary excluded. Perhaps consider using ChatGPT to write your job advert – it does this incredibly well to give you a starting point, getting you past any initial hesitation to “get started”.
- Don’t doubt yourself and your “little company” – ONLY hire A-Players and settle for nothing less. Always look first within your own organisation for any post, as you may have people you can promote, or wants more hours, or knows someone who is also looking for work (who would therefore come with a personal recommendation, if coming from a team member you really trust). Why not consider using a “finders fee” within your organisation, similar to commission for sales, if one of your team introduces you to someone you can recruit? Why not formalise it as a £200 “Thank You” if the new starter joins and passes their probation phase?
Which agencies would we recommend:
This agency will consolidate and post across many places for between £199 and £599, with totally transparent prices.
etalent will do the same consolidation, but also do candidate profiling… One client recently wanted to recruit an electrician, and so arranged a testing-based question for candidates before they apply, around providing a test result from a domestic circuit board and give some possible solutions.
Every legal document you would want for your business will be available here – totally affordable. These are all reviewed and kept up to date regularly, and then any disputes are covered by professional indemnity.
Book recommendations:
