Finding great employees that care about your business is the goal of every small business owner – but it’s easier said than done. If you’re having trouble finding good people to hire that you can trust with your business, you’re not alone. In this two-part series, we’ll talk about ways to find and keep great employees so that you can keep the lights on in your showroom.
In Part 1, we’ll be talking about how to find good talent by following a different process than the traditional help-wanted-ad and interviews process.
Your Ad Matters
The backbone of every good marketing campaign is a solid understanding of its audience. Write to your audience about what they want, what they need, and how you can help them get it. Your want ad will fall flat on its face if the only thing you include is a laundry list of job responsibilities – that’s all about what they can do for you, and none of what you can do for them.
Your most important sale is with your staff, not your customers.
Your want ad could be the most important piece of marketing you write this year, so you can’t phone it in. Your ad needs to stand out if it’s going to attract the right kind of talent.
At the very start of your ad, tell your prospective employees what they want to hear. Talk to them about their future. Tell them what it could be like if they worked for you. Answer the question “What’s in it for them?” – because “a paycheck” isn’t going to be enough to make you stand out in the sea of Help Wanted.
Root Out the Tire Kickers
When your ad stands out, you’ll get applications. The best way to quickly sift out the job seekers that aren’t serious is to include a “homework assignment” in your ad.
I’m not talking about making people jump through hoops with unnecessary busywork or unpaid trials. Keep it simple – something like this is all it takes:
“Email your resume to <your email> and include the answers to these 3 questions:
- Which wall sconce would you recommend for a small bath?
- What type of job would leave you going home happy?
- What’s your favorite thing to do on the weekends?”
The subject of the questions doesn’t matter a great deal, although you can learn a little about the applicant by their answers. The main goal of this exercise is to quickly and easily weed out the applications that aren’t worth your time. If they don’t answer the questions, then they don’t get considered. Either they don’t actually want the job, or they don’t have the attention to detail that’s necessary to work in a showroom.
The Interactive Interview
Studies have shown over and over that the typical job interview isn’t very effective for actually identifying whether a candidate is a great fit (on both sides) or not. There is too much posturing and attempting to “get it right” for the answers to traditional interview questions to be reliable.
As much as possible, try to put people into real-world situations. In some cases, I’ll invite a candidate to come and work for us for a week on a temp basis and allow both sides to see if they still feel comfortable after working together. This isn’t possible in many situations, however, in those cases, I will start out by writing down the actual TYPES of action we need (greeting customers, organizing a list of items in Excel, etc.) and then role-play with candidates to get a real-scenario feel for how they’d handle the things that will be expected.
I’m also big on asking for situations and not attributes. “Tell me about a time when you dealt with an impossibly difficult customer and how you handled it? What did you do well? What would you do differently?” for example. The more you can ask about specific situations that the candidate has already been through, the more insight you’ll gain into their actual history and not just what they put onto a resume.
Finally, I’ll often devise games or puzzles that I ask the candidate to think about and try to solve. This may seem like a trite thing to ask, but in my experience “resilience” and “willingness to apply energy” are two of the very most important attributes for any position. If a candidate just responds with “I don’t know” or gives up very quickly, you can bet that they’ll have the same tendency when asked to do harder things as an employee. I try to bring in team members who aren’t afraid to roll up the sleeves and accept a challenge.
Seal the Deal and Keep it Real
Finding good talent isn’t easy. A well-written want ad with a “filter” will help get you out of the swamp – but you still need to turn the crank. Just remember – small businesses rely heavily on community and reputation, so keep your hiring practices in line with the way you do business. Keep your deadlines, be responsive, and never “ghost” a prospective applicant that hasn’t been chosen. You never know who they’ll talk to about their experience, and you wouldn’t want to sour the milk for a future customer or employee at your next round of hiring.
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Finding great employees can feel a little like searching for a needle in a haystack. To get it right, there needs to be more to your job hunt than a 3-sentence help-wanted ad. Take the time to turn your open position into an opportunity worth taking – and if you market yourself well, good talent will find you.
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Coming up in Part 2 – Even more important than finding good talent is keeping good talent. We’ll be talking about creative ways to reward great employees so they’ll want to stay.
