At the lowest point of my career I discovered the three secret weapons for great recruitment. They were easily implemented, didn’t cost unlimited funds and were ignored by the majority of organisations. In fact, they are still so rarely used that those who apply them stand out like beacons in the marketplace and achieve outstanding recruitment success.
My transformation began when I flew into London to co-found Flight Centre’s UK operation. With a mandate to open one shop a month, finding good employees was vital to the success of the whole operation. Having run a successful recruitment and training centre in Australia, I was confident that my HR skills were up to the challenge. Imagine my shock, then, when three months later despite receiving lots of applications, I still hadn’t employed a single decent recruit.
Up to this point I’d never realised how much my company’s branding had contributed to my recruitment success. Flight Centre was a big fish in Australia but in the UK we were barely a guppy. My recruitment ads attracted hundreds of responses but most of them were unsuitable.
‘Hope’ Recruitment
There was only one thing to do to fix this. I panicked and increased my advertising spend in a bid to attract more good candidates. I now call this strategy ‘hope recruitment’. It operates on the conventional principle that the best way to recruit more people is to attract more people. Yet I still couldn’t fill my vacancies. I realized that money was not the answer, yet I had no other mechanism for dealing with hiring failure.
And then I discovered my 3 secret weapons to great recruitment……
Secret Weapon Number 1:
Sales – Once I realized that competing for employees was as difficult as competing for customers I began to see the whole business of recruitment in another light. If I was going to convert great people into employees then I needed to break away from the accepted paradigm that they would be lucky to be employed, flip it around, and recognise that I was fortunate if they chose to work for me. I needed to convince good people that my role and my organisation was the right fit for them. This was Sales 101 at its most basic and it became my first secret weapon of great recruitment.
I applied sales strategies to every stage of recruitment – such as creating a great first impression; developing a candidate-friendly application process; inventing new tools to effectively sell the benefits of working for the organization; employing warm empathic recruiters; and personalizing all the contract documents – so that suitable applicants always signed up with me. By focusing on converting all the great candidates who applied, not just trying to attract more of them, I was on a winning path, because most of my competitors didn’t comprehend and weren’t assessing their progress in this aspect at all.
Secret Weapon Number 2:
Now I knew that it was my own hiring practices at fault it didn’t take me long to identify another secret weapon:
Speed – When I realized that good applicants were like great houses – they don’t stay on the market for long – I cut my time from placing the ad to hiring down to 7 days. I worried that this might reek of desperation but on the contrary, people took it as a positive, saw my company as dynamic and in two weeks I had recruited six great people, one of who went on to become the company’s future managing director. Here’s how this works:
The best recruits always apply in the first few days after advertising, and by making them an offer within a week I didn’t get into bidding wars as my competitors hadn’t even reached the interview stage by then.
Secret Weapon Number 3:
Attitude: Sales and speed are blunt tools without my third secret weapon – the keystone to a successful recruitment system. I discovered it after realising that using work skills to identify recruits, which is what most employers do, doesn’t take into account other important aspects of the person. This becomes obvious when you think about why people don’t work out in roles. They might fight with their co-workers; be late for work; never finish projects on time; be unprofessional in meetings; have affairs with subordinates or even steal money. None of these factors has anything to do with their skills or qualifications.
Over time I worked out that a person’s attitude is key to their future achievement. If someone is negative in outlook this will colour all their relationships and dealings. There is no magic ‘off’ switch when they enter the corporate world. The opposite also applies. Positive, committed people apply themselves with gusto to every endeavor and make the best employees.
In my book Winning The War for Talent I outline the 5 key attitudes of great recruits and how to screen for them objectively. From then on I was able to recruit people with the five desired attitudes, and then train them in the core work skills. Rather than competing with my rivals for the technically skilled recruits, I sourced suitable candidates with good attitudes from varied backgrounds, to meet all my business needs. These high achievers then went on to become outstanding leaders in the business as well.
The Final Outcome:
With my 3 secret weapons to great recruitment not only did I rescue my career, but in 2003, Flight Centre’s small UK operation placed first in the Leadership category and third in the overall category of the Sunday Times’ Employer of the Year awards, surprising the retail industry and beating much larger and longer-established competitors such as Marks & Spencer and Tesco. I’ve now used them to solve many other organisations’ hiring problems as well.