© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

Recruiting and Hiring

When you need to fill a new job, or replace a person leaving an existing job, you

can hire the first person who comes along, or you can be careful about it and make sure you have the right person for the job. The question is…how do you get

the right person?

Putting on new employees isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems problem. If you have an effective system for recruiting and hiring employees, you won’t have people problems. Good recruiting and hiring costs time and money, and poor recruiting and hiring costs a lot more, and wastes a lot of time. They hurt the morale of the other employees. They make it hard, if not impossible, to get the results you need in order to achieve your strategic intent. Why is that? Well, there are several reasons. When you have the wrong people on the job, whether it be wrong skills or wrong attitudes, you spend a lot of time and attention trying to bring them up to speed, and correcting their mistakes. When they don’t you have to spend a lot more time and money recruiting new ones to replace them. New people have to be trained in their jobs and that takes more time and money. During their training time, and while they’re getting proficient at their jobs, they’re not very productive. Low productivity costs still more money and slows down other workers who depend on the contributions of the new workers. You can see how important it is to have reliable systems for recruiting and hiring new employees.

© 2015 Next Level Up. All rights reserved.

How many times have you experienced a bad hire? Whenever I ask people to think about their three worst hires ever and then give me the reasons why they were the worst hires, the answers are almost always in values, attitudes and work ethic. They didn’t care about the customers or the team. They couldn’t be bothered, they had a terrible attitude and so on. When I asked when they were first alerted to that, when they were first aware of the very first, tiniest red flag. The answer is almost

always in the first interview, but I ignored it. I was so desperate to get someone in quickly, or I noticed it in the first few weeks, but I was so relieved I had someone, I thought it would get better. As I said, bad hires are expensive, time consuming and high stress generators. So the missing system for these people was in their recruiting and hiring systems. It’s better to put in the effort at the beginning of the process and get it right.