Step #3: Recruit More DNA
Where Do We Find More of Them?
Armed with your DNA Profile and the responses to your DNA Interview, you are now ready to create your employee recruiting and staffing plan. Based upon my best-selling book Finding and Keeping Great Employees (AMACOM, 1999), here are three recruiting best practices to use to find great people:
1. Wow them. Make sure your recruitment strategies are compelling; you want potential applicants to step back and say, “Wow, this place is different.”
To do this, first ask yourself: What are we doing to step out and stand apart from our competition when recruiting top talent? How are we driving our brand, our uniqueness? Do we invest in professional recruiting or settle for using third-generation copies of employee applications? Do our recruiting strategies clearly differentiate our company’s values, mission, or market positioning?
If you choose to blend in with all the others, then you will not attract the best people. You might think these questions are ridiculous (“Hey, we’re just in the lumber business”), but if you want employees with high potential to show up at your offices, you need to demonstrate from the beginning that your company is professional and special.
2. Go fishing where the fish are. I do not fish (except when I play golf, that is), but if I ask great fishermen about their secrets to success, they reply, “Jim, all you’ve got to do is go fishing where the fish are!”
Progressive building supply companies take their DNA Interview responses and base their targeted recruiting campaigns around where top talent hang out or where they’ve found other top talent. Whether it’s a hunting club, bowling alley, civic group, softball team, or church group, be visible and professional in the places where your best people live. If you find that several of your best employees love to bowl, consider sponsoring a league or becoming visible in a league already formed. If their kids enjoy baseball or Boy/Girl Scouts, offer to support these activities. For example, after learning through their DNA Profile that many of their top engineers enjoy gardening, one Silicon Valley-based high-tech firm began sponsoring hiring kiosks at garden shows.
3. Get real. One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. This is exactly what great candidates expect to hear during the interview process: what is good about your group, what is bad, and what is just plain ugly and needs fixing.
Some of you may flinch (or get angry) that I suggest airing your dirty laundry during an interview; you may think that doing so will run good people off. But you’re wrong. Great employees are motivated by a challenge. They appreciate your candor and honesty, and are more likely to stay after being hired if they know the problems they will face than if they are surprised by them after they start.
Getting real also helps candidates deselect themselves. By sharing some of the challenges they may face, candidates may take their name out of the running, thereby saving you and them valuable time while preventing frustration during the hiring process.
A yard manager at one of my building supply clients takes potential new employees on a yard tour, shares the good, the bad, and the ugly, and then leaves the candidate with his other yard workers to ask them questions. After the interview, the manager asks his colleagues their impressions of the candidate and if they would like him or her as a colleague. By getting real, this manager has quickly prevented many potentially troublesome employees from ever being hired while ensuring that new hires know what to expect.
