How To Find and Retain The Right Employees, Part I

Sure, it's an employer's market out there in these challenging economic times. Does that mean the cream is rising to the top in candidate pools? Quite possibly. Or it could mean more candidates, more resumes to sort through who may or may not be the right fit; who may be over or under qualified, have the right communication skills for the position, or not, and so on. As an employer, are you finding the right flavor of candidates who not only look good on paper, but when put to the test, weather the initial probationary period AND want to stay with your company?

If not, you may want to look within yourself and diagnose where the candidate pool is failing you. Let's begin with the job description.

The Job Description - Get To The Point

Some things to consider when composing and evaluating your job description:

Hierarchy

Are you highlighting the key tasks the incumbent will really have to excel in, placing them right at the top of the job description? Displaying the most important responsibilities in hierarchical order can help readers of your job posting better assess if this job fits them. If key points are placed lower down in your description, they naturally are considered less important.

Honesty

Are you being truly honest about your expectations, the job responsibilities and the benefits? Employers tend to down grade and even fail to mention certain less desirable realities of a job in the hopes candidates will overlook these job features when they start, when doing so could help weed out the wrong candidates right from the beginning. For example, if you need this position to work over-time on occasion or frequently, or have fast turnaround times for projects, don't be afraid to write it into the job description, tactfully. This could save a lot of time in training and retraining candidates who just don't stack up to your expectations in the long run.

Re-Writing As A Tool To Rethinking

In re-writing the job description, are you finding key insights into what made this position difficult for the past incumbent, or new tasks you need now which were not in the last job description? For example, you may have determined that this position is really 1 and 1/2 jobs, or a job for a full-time employee and a part-time employee. Or perhaps, instead of a senior position, it is an intermediate one, and therefore may have less responsibilities, and so on. Sometimes re-writing the job description from scratch helps uncover valuable insights otherwise overlooked.

The Job Interview - Time to Talk and Listen

Now that you have a more concise and clear job description, how can you ensure you are accurately assessing each candidate in person? Previous candidates passed with flying colors, but they either didn't perform or decided this job wasn't working for them. How can a one-hour or less session provide insight into employee retention? Let's look again at your last interview sessions and consider the following:

Matching Personalities With The Job

Were you up front with the candidate regarding the communication skills they were expected to bring to the job, if it was important? Did you engage in discussion with the candidate, allowing them to demonstrate their communication and social skills in conversation? If so, how did they fare? How important was their ability to articulate for this particular job?

Working Under Pressure

A job interview can often provide great insight into how a person performs under pressure. If the candidate flubbed a word or said something in error, how did they recover? Did their sense of humor prevail, or did they become agitated or quiet? Sometimes a little psychology evaluation can indicate if the candidate will be able to handle the type of pressures a particular job will entail, which translates, again to retention.

Listening Skills

A job interview should also help you evaluate how well the incumbent could take instruction and follow through. Did the candidate listen thoroughly as you initiated a discussion, then offer his or her own comments following a reiteration of your key points to demonstrate they understood and listened? Did they seem impatient and bored or engaged and enthusiastic about job responsibilities?

These are some ideas to help you get started on finding and retaining great, or at least better employees. Ideally, we want to get the right candidate the FIRST time around, and more often than not we succeed. But occasionally, either we send out the wrong message or it is misinterpreted wrongly by incumbents and we end up with less-than-ideal employees who are the wrong fit, and eventually determine this themselves. To avoid this possibility, a little prep time and self-evaluation go a long way.

In the second part of this topic, we will look at additional resources as well as employment from the candidate/employee's perspective, as more food for thought in creating an exciting and compelling job description.