Is your business attracting the best talent?

How to Attract the Right Candidates for Vacancies

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Employing the right person to fit with your business is critical for small businesses, so how can SMEs compete against large companies and corporations when trying to attract the best talent for their organisation?  

How does your business look to a prospective employee?

A good place to start is to think about putting the shoe on the other foot.  How would you want to be treated if you had experience, drive and ambition to offer a prospective employer?  I guess you would want to be ‘wooed’ or ‘courted’ even.  It is up to Owner/Directors to entice this talent and impress your prospective new employee so they can’t resist you becoming their employer of choice.

Who is your prospective employee?

But who is that prospective employee?  How do you find that golden nugget from the short listed CVs you now have or have been given by your recruitment consultant/agency?  To do this, you have to look within your organisation and decide on the values you want individuals working for you to portray. Your employees should match the culture of your organisation. 

A Person Specification is great in drawing up a picture of your ideal employee.  It gets you to focus on whether the employee needs to hold certain qualifications, industry knowledge, skills, experience and personal attributes.  You can then decide which are essential and desirable.  

A clear job description will outline exactly what the role entails, reporting lines, responsibilities and duties.  It sometimes helps to walk the job yourself to see clearly what the requirements of the role are.

The Recruitment Process

When going through the recruitment process, don’t make it unnecessarily long or over complicated.  A face to face interview is still considered to be the best way of recruiting, but also consider psychometric testing as part of the recruitment process.  They are a great tool in learning more about the candidate and how they would behave in certain situations and more importantly to learn about their values.  If they match your organisational ones, then it’s worth pursuing this applicant.

Keep the applicant in the loop the whole time.  Open lines of communication will ensure the candidate knows where they are in the recruitment process and therefore feel valued by your company.  Remember if this candidate is the ideal employee, then communication at every stage is critical.  The candidate is forming an opinion of your company and how this develops is up to you.  

If you decide to outsource your recruitment activity to a consultant or agency, again make sure they can portray your organisation in the way you want it to be portrayed. Discuss and agree with them how the recruitment will be managed, who will be the main contact with the candidates, ensure they can treat the candidates in the manner you have decided upon.  All stakeholders (candidate, you the Owner/Director and Recruitment Company) need to be communicating and aiming in the same direction.

Issuing a Contract

Once you have managed to secure the ideal candidate and they have accepted your job offer, follow this up quickly with an Offer Letter and Contract of Employment.  Unfortunately, many SMEs fail to issue a Contract or Terms and Conditions to their employees or issue it in a timely manner which can lead to the employee not feeling valued.

Your new employee‘s experience of your organisation needs to continue post offer of a job, through to a positive induction programme.  This will help your newest recruit to feel valued and engaged before they have even walked through the door. 

Need help putting together contracts and terms? Lunar HR can help and support your business with this and many other HR requirements.

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