In a growth economy, it’s up to you to help your clients attract and recruit the best possible team–so that they can leverage the good economic news for increased business and market share. So here’s a proven 4-step hiring system for business coaching clients that you can share.
One of the analogies I love to use when I talk about hiring is fishing. The companies that get the best people are the ones that get a lot of fish on deck so they can be choosy.
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Prepare the Bait. Market for employees in unusual ways. Create the ad and the description of the opportunity in a way it really gets the fish wanting to jump onboard. Encourage clients to use high-impact copywriting principles to paint the picture for the kind of employee they want to attract, including killer headlines, benefits, and bullets.
Step 2: Cast the Net. One of the biggest mistakes I see business owners make is not having enough strategies to draw applicants. When this happens, you have a business owner deploying maybe one or two strategies, then every time they have a position to fill, they only get two or three applicants. But the challenge is that if you only get two or three applicants for a position, that might not be enough! The big fish you’re looking for–the ideal employee–might not have been one of those two or three applicants! So we’ve got to be aggressively proactively recruiting using multiple strategies. Here are some of my favorites:
- Look within the organization first.
- Call back quality past team members and say, “What do I have to do to get you back?”
- Post the ad in your door or window.
- Post the ad in your local papers, daily papers, trade and industry publications, high schools, colleges, vo-tech schools, houses of worship.
- Email, mail, or fax your ads to your customer database, to your vendors, to your personal business database.
- Include a recruiting incentive plan in your team members’ paychecks.
- Utilize a recruiter, headhunter, or employment temp agency.
- Network with recruitment in mind.
- Use websites like www.indeed.com, www.monster.com, www.careerbuilder.com, and all the rest.
Step 3. Sort the Fish. One of the other reasons that business owners don’t cast a big net is because they don’t want to interview ten or fifteen people. That’s why we recommend a virtual screening process which cuts down the interviewing dramatically.
Ask all applicants to call a voicemail number as part of their application. When they call, they’re going to hear a script that sounds something like this: “Good morning, and thanks for calling my company. My name is Joe, I am the founder of the company. Right now, we’re looking for an office manager to help our company continue its rapid growth. What I need you to do is give me a thirty to sixty-second explanation of the following three things: What experience have you had keeping books with QuickBooks? What experience have you had creating Excel spreadsheets and reports? And what experience have you had answering the phones and talking to customers? If you need to take a few minutes to write the questions down and formulate your response and then call back, feel free to do so.”
This is a simple step, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly the cream rises to the top.
[A virtual screening process] is a simple step, but you'll be amazed at how quickly the cream rises to the top.
Step 4. Reel Them In. Once your clients have sorted their candidates, it’s time to choose one or two of the best ones out of the group to come in. This part of the process I also like to refer to as the “test drive.” It’s when clients take the shortlist of candidates who made it through the phone interview and bring them into an event where they compete for the position by performing actual on-the-job tasks. For example, if your client is hiring salespeople, bring five to ten people in and have them sit at the phones and actually try to generate leads. Or have them role play with each other. An administrative assistant might demonstrate their skills at office work.
Coach your clients through the process of putting together this test-drive experience, and then help them monitor the results to make the right hire.
For more great skills and systems you can share with your clients, get a FREE 30-day trial of our comprehensive business coaching system–which covers everything from generating leads to coaching clients!
