how to attract and retain the best employees
TRANSCRIPT
How to attract and retain the best employees
Rob Hayter, Director,
TPP Recruitment
What we’ll cover…
• Job descriptions & person specifications
• Making your role appeal
• Selling your organisation to candidates
• Interview questions
• Ensuring your new hires succeed
The most common mistakes
• Not asking the right interview questions
• Not recruiting for a cultural fit
• Relying solely on interview
• Not checking references
The most common mistakes
• Automatically rejecting candidates
• Copying and pasting
• Missing the opportunity to sell your organisation
The most common mistakes
• The Purple Squirrel
• Asking ‘illegal’ interview questions
The most common mistakes
• Mishandling applications
Selling your organisation
• Is it all about salary?
• Career development
• Values & culture
• Flexible working & Pension
• Benefits
What are your problems?
Low salary? Excellent benefits / job stability
Remote location? Homeworking, flexible hours
Less attractive cause? Shout about impact
Smaller organisation? Taking on more responsibility
Find solutions to problems
Job descriptions / Person spec
• Forces you to think about skills and experience
• Change role/shift team responsibilities
• Helps the recruiter
• Manage candidate expectations
• Use as checklist for shortlisting and interviews
• Use to assess performance after hire
Job descriptions / Person spec
• Be specific
• Leave room for development & growth
• Do not discriminate on gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality or health
• Ask employees and beneficiaries
their opinion
Job descriptions / Person spec
• Job title, position in the company, line manager and reports
• Location
• Salary and benefits
• Overview, main purpose and objectives, duties
• Skills/qualifications showing essential and desirable
• Specialist requirements
• Examples projects to illustrate the requirements
Job descriptions / Person spec
• Technical, organisational and creative skills
• Specific qualifications or education required
• Overview of personality fit
• Character traits that help do the job effectively
• Preferred criteria, e.g. volunteering, causal knowledge
• Hands on Mangler
• Good language skulls
• Excellent communication skills written and herbal
• Highly motivated team layer
• Working crossly with customers
• Excellency attention to detail
• Provided justification to additional stuffing requirements
Selling your organisation
• PREPARE!
• Find out what each candidate wants
• Know your organisation / benchmark
• Sell the mission
• Talk about the future
• Employer brand and office culture
• Don’t duck issues
Conducting the interview
• PREPARE (again!)
• Listen and allow the candidate talk
• Be positive
• Share some information
Conducting the interview
• Behavioural questioning:
– Candidates give examples of specific past situations and how they behaved
– Past performance predicts future behaviour
– Judging competency, rather than interviewing skill
– Follow up examples to get more detail
– Difficult to exaggerate or ‘fudge’ answers
Interview Questions
• What do you do when your schedule is interrupted? Give an example of how you handle it.
• Have you had to convince a team to work on a project they weren't thrilled about? How did you do it?
• What question didn’t we ask that you think we should have?
Place of Birth, Ethnicity or Religion
• Don’t ask: What country are you from? Where were you born?
• Do ask: Are you eligible to work in the UK?
• Don’t ask: What is your native language?
• Do ask: This job requires someone who speaks more than one language.
What languages are you fluent in?
• Don’t ask: What religion do you practice? Which religious holidays do you
observe?
• Do ask: Can you work in the days/schedule required for this role?
Marital Status, Children or Sexual Preference
• Don’t ask: Do you have or plan to have children?
• Do ask: Are you available to work overtime on occasion? Can you travel?
• Don’t ask: How many children do you have? Do you have childcare
arrangements in place if we need you to work out of hours?
• Do ask: This job may require some overtime work on short notice. Is this a
problem for you? What days/hours are you available to work?
• Don’t ask: Is this your maiden name?
• Do ask: Are any of your references or qualifications under another name?
• Don’t ask: If you went on maternity leave, would you come back to work
afterwards?
• Do ask: What are your long term career goals?
Gender or Age
• Don’t ask: We’ve always had a woman/man in this role. How do you think
you will handle it?
• Do ask: What can you bring to this role?
• Don’t ask: How do you feel about managing men/women?
• Do ask: Tell me about your previous experience of managing staff.
• Don’t ask: How old are you? Just don’t!
• Don’t ask: When did you graduate?
• Do ask: Do you have a degree or other qualification related to this role?
Location
• Don’t ask: How far would your commute be?
• Do ask: Are you able to start work at 9am?
Lifestyle Choices
• Don’t ask: Do you belong to any clubs or organisations?
• Do ask: Are you a member of any professional group that’s relevant to this
role?
• Don’t ask: Are you a member of the Territorial Army/Special
Constabulary/Other Volunteer Force?
• Do ask: Do you have any commitments that would require extensive time
away from work?
Disability or Illness
• Don’t ask: How many sick days did you take last year?
• Do ask: How many unscheduled days of work did you miss last year?
Height or weight
• Don’t ask: How tall are you?
• Do ask: Are you able to reach items on a shelf that’s five feet tall?
• Don’t ask: How much do you weigh?
• Do ask: Are you able to lift boxes weighing up to 50 pounds?
Assessing Interviews
• It’s all about scoring
Onboarding
Onboarding
• Make sure they have a workstation, email, telecoms, network drives etc set up
• Order business cards
• Make sure key events and meetings are in their diary
• Update your org chart, telephone directories, staff list, seating plans
• Book time for induction
Onboarding
• Written plan of their objectives and responsibilities
• Make sure it is clear what is needed to pass probation
• Have all paperwork ready to be completed
• Introductions plus assign a mentor or buddy
• Run through your organisation’s formal policies, as well as informal conventions like dress code, sickness procedure etc
• Take them out to lunch with a group of colleagues
• Set regular (weekly if possible) meetings
• Arrange a formal progress meeting (often a probation review) after three months.
• In the unfortunate situation where things are not working out, act promptly.
Onboarding
Why do people leave?
71%
47% 46%
40% 34% 34%
22% 17%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
TPP Survey 2014
Thank you for listening
TPP Recruitment @TPPNotforProfit
T: 020 7198 6000 @Rob_Hayter
W: www.tpp.co.uk
Oddball questions
1. Room, desk, or car - which do you clean first? 2. What do you think of garden gnomes? 3. Name five uses of a stapler without staples. 4. How would you get an elephant into a refrigerator? 5. How many people are using Facebook in San Francisco at 2:30PM
on a Friday? 6. If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you
prove it? 7. How would you cure world hunger? 8. How many different ways can you get water from a lake at the
foot of a mountain, up to the top of the mountain ? 9. If you were a Microsoft Office program, which one would you be? 10. Pepsi or Coke?