The burden have reversed from not being able to find candidates to having too many to deal with.  Many people have never faced this problem before and are looking for solutions.  This 22 minute video gives you the model I have used successfully for many years to deal with this specific problem.  The ideas can be put to use immediately and don’t cost any money.  As always, I welcome your comments.

Your UHP simply answers the question, “Why should I work for you?” Think of it as the driving force, your mission statement for all your recruiting activity. People need a reason to work for you and your UHP supplies that reason. As a side note, your UHP also helps identify those people who should NOT work for you.

With your UHP in hand, you need to view attracting candidates as a sales problem. How do you go about attracting prospects for your product or service? First, you identify what a good prospect looks like. What interests them? Where do they live? What do they read? What do they do for fun? Where do they congregate? Once you know all this, then you can determine the best way of raising their interest. Finally you present your product in an appealing way and try to close the deal.

Recruiting is no different.

You can start to put your strategy in place armed with all the information you know about your prospective candidates. You use this knowledge to decide where to advertise, in what publications or on which sites. More than 50% of the success of any ad is determined by where it is placed. The greatest ad running in the wrong location is not likely to generate a whole lot of response. Industry specific publications, web sites, ezines and discipline specific sites are a much better source than general newspaper classified or generic job-posting boards. Think strategically about where you will place your ad.

Next, you have to attract attention. This is done with the headline. Forget the boring “Tax Preparer” headline. You need to use the right words to attract just the right types of people. Remember, you must break the person’s pre-occupation and get them to read the copy. The purpose of the headline is simply to get them to read the ad copy. Here are some great words for your headlines:

Imagine
You
Amazing
New
Introducing
How would
Discover
Life
Do you
Now
Join

The best way to get the person’s attention is to appeal to something important to them … NOT YOU! If you have the word “we” in your headline, get rid of it. Remember, the focus of the ad must be on the candidate not you or your company. Candidates want to know what is in it for them.

In the body of your ad, you must appeal to the person’s interest or they will not read the ad. Once again, what’s in it for them? Talk about how they will benefit instead of features of your company. Solve their problem!

View this situation just like a marketing document. How do you stimulate interest in the prospect to learn more? You will not hire someone with an ad alone, but you will get the person to take the next step.

Finally, here is the most important technique you can use in creating a good recruitment ad: “Use Plain Language!” Write you ad as if you were talking to a prospect. After you write your ad, read it out loud. Does it read like a conversation or does it sound like an ad?

Your results will be significantly better when you use these techniques.

Samples Headlines

1. Join the fastest growing sales team in Cleveland
2. Join the #1 sales team in Seattle
3. Do you enjoy being on a winning team?
4. Imagine being surrounded by the best team in the industry?
5. Your life will never be the same
6. Now is the time to discover a winning opportunity
7. Do you want to help us grow in the fastest growing industry?
8. You have an amazing opportunity with our breakthrough
9. Discover and amazing opportunity
10. If fast growth and opportunity appeal to you, come talk to us
11. Want to sell the #1 product in the market?
12. Help us solve real problems for our customers
13. You will make a difference when you represent out product
14. Are you a quick study? There is an opportunity waiting for you
15. State of the art products require state of the art salespeople
16. Come grow with us
17. Your sales skills + our products = success!
18. Controlling your future is not an option, it is part of the job
19. Read on to find out why our salespeople are ranked #1
20. How would you like to write your own ticket?

One final thought, make it easy for them to respond. Give them as many options as possible. You don’t want to seem like a difficult place to do business with. You wouldn’t make it difficult for a prospect to get in touch with so don’t make it difficult for a candidate to get in touch with you.

The answer is extremely predictable.  The company that gets the business is the one with the best sales people.  Good sales people win more business regardless of the circumstances.  Are you going to win the next time you find yourself in this position?

The best opportunity you have to impact the productivity of your organization is every time you make a hiring decision.  Good hiring decisions propel you to success.  And, all the managing, coaching, systems, training and technology CANNOT help you recover from a hiring mistake.

Over and over again we see examples of companies with inferior products; over-priced products and poor reputations win the business.  Why?  Because they have the best people.  Today’s market is as competitive a market as you are going to find.  If you want the edge in this battle, upgrade your work force and you have the best chance of succeeding.

Most organizations suffer from the 80-20 rule.  You get 80% of your productivity from 20% of your people.  This applies to hiring as well. For years I have listened to Business Owners talk about hiring five and keeping one good person.  This is a terrifically costly way to do business.  Let’s translate some of the costs so you can see just how much this flawed strategy is costing you.  Here’s an example:

You hire John in your Seattle office.  After a month it doesn’t look good.  After 90 days it is really bad. At six months you give up and let John go.  This problem is even worse when John worked with some of your best clients.

This all too familiar scenario happens time and time again.  Unfortunately, you get lulled into believing that all you lost was six months of salary and benefits.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  In addition to salary and benefits you have the following hidden costs; opportunity costs, administrative costs, training costs, vacancy costs and separation costs.  And for a small business, these costs could be fatal!

Let’s look at a CPA with a $75,000 base salary.  Salary and benefits for six months cost $48,750.  It cost you $10,000 to recruit the person.  You spent $5000 on training classes and materials.  And those are just the hard dollar costs.

Your soft costs begin with lost opportunity.  If John alienated you top client, what is the life-time value of that client? (Cost $200,000)

How about your time?  Would you have been more productive using your time working with someone who was more productive?  (Cost 15% of your annual compensation ($45,000) Make sure you add separation and administrative costs.  (Cost = $60,000)

Another intangible in this equation is employee morale.  Your good employees resent having a non-performer on the staff.  It makes them look bad and they have to work harder as a result.  (Cost: What is the cost of losing one top employee?)

Your cost of one hiring mistake is roughly $308,750 without counting the cost of losing one of your top employees.  And here is the really sad part, if you do make this hiring mistake; you have to do it all over again doubling all the numbers!  How does $617,500 sound for a $75K CPA?

Now you can see why the “hire a bunch and keep a few” staffing strategy is a mistake.  The good news is you are on your way to fixing the situation as we speak.  The first step in upgrading your work force is to recognize the problem.  Next, you have to put a great recruiting and hiring process in place that gives you the highest probability of hiring top talent.

A great way to get started is to invest in your education.  The more you know about recruiting and hiring good people, the better chance you have of building a winning team.  Reading books and attending workshops will help you expand your knowledge base. If you are not expanding your knowledge base, when you compete against someone who is, the outcome is fairly certain.

You have to start by knowing what you are looking for.  This sounds so simple but is at the heart of most hiring mistakes.  Begin by outlining your work process.  Understanding the mechanics of your business cycle is crucial to understanding the type of person who will be successful.  Just because a person was successful at another company (even a direct competitor) does not mean they will be successful on your job.

At each step of your business cycle, identify what behaviors are necessary for success?  How do your successful people behave?  The answer to this question is the key to building an effective performance-based success profile.  Build a list of all the behaviors necessary for success on your job.

Now the question that I am sure is swimming through your mind is, “How do I figure out if the person sitting across the desk from me behaves this way.  Let me start by saying if you rely on gut feel, interview behavior and the person’s track record you are doomed to fail.  That’s right; these typical measures are not the best way to predict success on your job.

You need a proven system of gathering and evaluating data if you are going to make good hiring decisions.  The more you know about a person, the easier it is to predict success on your job.

Once you realize the economic impact recruiting and hiring has on your business, you’re ready to take the steps necessary to get on track.  You just can’t leave your recruiting and hiring to chance.  Recruiting and hiring top talent has to be your top priority.

Typical Costs of a Bad Hire

Separation Costs:
$ Termination administrative costs
$ Costs for exit interview
$ Severance/separation pay
$ Unemployment compensation

Vacancy Costs
$ Additional overtime
$ Temporary help
$ Missed deadlines

Replacement Costs
$ Recruiting costs
$ Selection interviews
$ Testing
$ Travel/moving expenses
$ Pre-employment administrative expenses
$ Acquisition and dissemination of information

Training Costs

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$ Formal training
$ Informal/OTJ training

Opportunity Costs
$ Lost sales
$ Missed opportunities
$ Management time
$ Dissatisfied customers
$ Low employee morale
$ Cost of mistakes made by poor employee

Ray runs a one man shop southeast of Seattle with his wife running the office.  During the 70′s and most of the 80′s, Ray was the head mechanic at the largest Fiat dealership in the northwest.  When the dealership folded, Ray started his own repair shop working strictly on Fiats.  Lots of service bays, lots of employees, you get the picture.

Now, for the story.

Ray was telling me why he shut down the repair shop and opened his one-man facility.  It was because his employees drove him crazy.  Imagine my surprise.

You see, Ray could not understand why his employees would not take the time to do the job right (Ray is a perfectionist which is a nice quality in a mechanic).  He could not understand why his employees would not take the time to learn a new skill or technique rather than just give up.  Ray could not understand why his employees would walk out the door at five o’clock even if the car they were working on was not finished.

His solution was to hire and fire, hire and fire and then repeat.  This went on until he could take it no more and he just closed up the shop.  This is not all that unusual for most businesses.

Let’s look at how you can avoid this situation.  First, LEARN HOW TO HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE!  I know I sound like a broken record but hiring the right people fixes so many of your problems.  And part of hiring the right people is to use the performance-based success profile from my Selecting Winners System.  With this document you will set expectations for your people up-front.  And, managing to stated, agreed upon expectations makes life much easier.

The key principle of the Selecting Winners System is to identify the behavior necessary for success on your job and find people who behave that way.  Ray was looking for people who behaved similar to himself.  The problem was he was not interviewing for that behavior.  Work ethic, attention to detail and the ability to learn would have been far more important than the ability to rebuild a carburetor.

This is a lesson that all of you can put into practice.  I hear people ask about fit and culture all the time.  They ask me how to interview for these difficult concepts.  My answer is to identify how the person has to act and react (behavior) to the situations to be successful.  Once you have identified that behavior, you can start to interview for it in the interview.

I am not trying to convince you that hiring and managing employees is easy.  But, you can do things to make it a much more pleasant and successful endeavor.

For more information please visit us at www.SelectingWinners.com