As an entrepreneur, you may be unsure about how to start when it comes to expanding your team. You’ve probably felt the pain of hiring the wrong person, followed by the time and expense spent cleaning up their mess.
When you operate a small business, your success depends on the quality and productivity of your team. Finding the right talent isn’t easy. It takes an excellent recruiting strategy to find and hire quality candidates. At this stage, tailored recruitment advising can come in handy.
But hiring the perfect person is a challenge. Quality candidates are searching for more than a job; they’re looking for the best possible fit for themselves for now and the future. On top of this, the best people have options. Just like you have competition in the marketplace, you have competition in the recruiting world. Candidates interview you just as much as you are interviewing them.
So, once you’ve identified your top candidates, it’s time to wow them. One way to do this is by bringing your sales skill into your role as a recruiter. Below is a three-step process that shows how you can implement sales into your hiring process.
Needs Analysis – 10 minutes
The goal is to determine what is most important to your candidate to decide if this role will be a good fit. What are they looking for in a job? What are they working towards? Knowing these answers will help you identify what they’re passionate about to determine whether they be a good fit for your organization long-term. With how much goes into training, it is crucial to figure this out upfront.
This is done in three parts:
1) Open Ended Questions
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- Why do you think you would like to be a part of the team?
- What are your financial goals?
- What interests you about the job?
Begin the conversation by asking open questions that allow them to open up and share what is important to them.
2) Probing
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- What sounds rewarding about working with x customers?
- What are you saving up for?
Be curious; understand what is important to them at a deeper level. Why is it important to them? What makes that important to them? How long has it been important to them? This will help you determine if you can help them or not.
3) Validating
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- So it sounds like you are saying ___ is important to you. Is that right?
As humans, we want to be heard and understood. The trust that could take days to build can be created in this simple phrase. This allows them to know that you heard them and understand their needs. The trick, if they say anything but YES after you validate that means you did not get it and you need to circle back and try again. It takes practice to be able to listen so attentively that they don’t respond, “yes and XYZ is important or going on in my life.”
Helicopter Tour – 10 minutes
Helicopters and planes fly over an area and allow you to see everything — the big picture. However, unlike a plane which has a long runway for takeoff and landing, a helicopter can come straight down and land in a specific spot that you want to see more in-depth. In your helicopter tour, you want to explain the role they are applying for as a whole, but allow your helicopter to land on 2-4 areas of that role that you will explain more in-depth because it relates to their need. This could be communicated as:
“Your training will look like XYZ, and this is when you will meet your colleagues and get to know them because I know a friendly working environment is important to you. When you are done training you will be doing XYZ and we have team events like X & Y where you can get to know your peers on a deeper level which is something you would enjoy since the work environment was so important to you.”
Confirm Benefits – 5 minutes
“From what I just described, how do you think this position could help you?”
This question is not for you — it is for the candidate. At this point, you might understand their needs and see how perfectly the features of this role fit their needs. That means nothing if they don’t understand that. Ask this question to give them a space to bring into consciousness all the reasons this role is a good fit for them and how it meets the needs they told you in the beginning. If they answer this question and don’t see the connections you do, this gives you a chance to connect the dots for them before your excitement takes over how good this role is.
Hiring the right talent is a difficult task that impacts on how your business runs now and in the future. Making the wrong choice could have lasting consequences, while the right choice could launch your business to the next level. These steps can help you in your interview process, but if recruiting isn’t your strong suit, and you don’t know where to start, you don’t have to go at it alone. Schedule a free two-hour session to dig into your business and develop a plan.
Nicole Gallop is a VP at Cultivate. As a strategic planner, Nicole is unafraid to push boundaries to achieve goals. Her passion is optimizing the potential for both you and your business. She operates with an intense focus on bringing the right people into a highly collaborative, positive and result-oriented environment.
