How to sell your company to new hires - competition for the best talent jpeg

Even in this Candidate Rich Market There is Competition for the Best Talent

No one likes rejection. But losing the best job candidate will add injury to insult. Hiring second-rate candidates will result in a second rate company. But attracting the best candidate doesn’t have to be about offering the most money.

Rejection Can be a Great Filter to Avoid Bad Hires

Firstly remember rejection isn’t all bad. You don’t want the smartest person, you want the right person for the job. Pretend the job is all puppies and rainbows and you could end up with a bad hire. The right hire is the sort of person that looks at your biggest, hairiest problems and thinks “Boy that looks like an interesting challenge for me to fix”.

If Your Staff Don’t do their Work – You Will Have to do it For Them

If you sell your company by how much it looks like a holiday camp, you attract people who want a holiday camp. A lot of managers think work is a four-letter word – after all we have to be bribed with pay to work. But think carefully about work and you will find that work can be motivating and provide meaning. That's why I started the Boss Camp program. It shows you proven management techniques to get better employee performance in just an hour a week.

What Can Work Give Your Employees Besides Paychecks

Work is an opportunity to:

  • Build meaningful relationships,
  • Provide a sense of belonging,
  • Learn new things and develop skills,
  • Do what you are good at,
  • Do meaningful things and
  • Be important to other people.

These are very strong intrinsic motivators. You can use these motivators to attract and engage employees. 

How Steve Jobs Put This into Practice in Recruiting:

Steve Jobs is well known for his talent for product design. What isn’t so well known is that Steve Jobs paid as much attention to designing his team as to designing products. Famously he recruited Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple by saying, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?” 

Where Steve Jobs got it Wrong about Finding Meaning in Work:

But the mistake that a lot of people make is you don’t have to be doing world changing type work to do meaningful work. Any work that is worth doing means something to someone.

So what do you do about it?

Don’t go through the hassle of interviewing only to be rejected by the best candidate. You can attract the right employees by using intrinsic motivators instead of more money. The best way to attract staff is to be the type of boss that people want to work for. If you haven't found out how to motivate employees without money and create a great place to work with ethical management practices then find out how in Boss.Camp

Practical Application:

I’m all about putting theory into practice so I’ll leave you with two easy to apply methods to attract employees:

  1. Vision: Convey your company’s mission. Why the company is important, what it means to other people to emotionally attract job candidates
  2. Challenge: Be open about the biggest challenges in their role but also include what recruits can get from this. The right recruits are motivated to solve the challenge. You can work this into the interview questions to make it flow. The biggest problem is X, how would you go about fixing that?” 

Are you hiring? Get help with finding the best people, spending less time on filtering and spotting bad hires. Delivered straight to your inbox. 

Comments:

Do you have any comments, tips or suggestions for selling your company to new hires? Please help the rest of us by sharing in the comments below.

The Hiring and Interviewing Series

This is part of the Interviewing and Hiring Series. This series covers how managers can increase employee performance through hiring better employees. And how managers can avoid common hiring mistakes.

Topics in the Series Include:

Other Relevant Resources:

Power Interview Pack: The complete set of interview questions to get the best candidate for the job. Increase employee performance through hiring the best staff and avoiding bad hires. Link here. 

Hiring for Performance: How to hire the best employees and improve employee performance, engagement and retention. Link here.  

Employee Onboarding for Performance: If employee onboarding goes wrong, your new hire may leave you in the lurch or become a demotivated low performer. But motivate and integrate your new hire well and you will have a happy, productive team member. Link here.

Boss Camp

Being a boss is a tough job - you have the world on the shoulders. You are the super hero that keeps the lights on and the team together. WWW.BOSS.CAMP is support for super hero’s like you so you can get your team to do more of their jobs, leaving you time to do your own. The program includes topics such as:

  • How to hire for performance
  • How to motivate employees,
  • What are bad employee motivators,
  • What you must do as a manager but isn't on your job description,
  • How leaders get power.