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Article: "Top Tips for Recruiting Staff for your Small to Medium Sized Business" by Catherine Price

Why is recruitment so important? There are two main reasons:

 1. Bad recruitment decisions lead to significant costs for small businesses.

These can be indirect costs – loss of production, loss of efficiency, loss of customers – if you get the wrong person in the job.

There can also be costs in your time. It takes longer to train someone who’s not really suitable for a post, it takes time to sort out their mistakes and, in the end, if you have to get rid of them, you have to take time to find someone else who can do the job and train them all over again.

There can be direct costs too. A lot of employment law is now heavily weighted towards the employee. If you have to get rid of someone, and you make procedural mistakes – and that’s very easy to do – you may find yourself in front of a tribunal. Simply defending yourself there can cost you money, and if you lose there could well be compensation to pay to your ex-employee.

These costs are all significant if you’re a large company or organisation. But for a small organisation they can be the difference between thriving and going under. I have seen at least one client whose previously thriving business has moved from trading profitably to trading at a loss because of one disastrous recruitment decision to a key post two years ago. That business is now on the market and they will not even recover the capital they’ve put into it.

 2. Good recruitment can be planned for

 If good recruitment were just a matter of luck then there wouldn’t be a lot of point in my writing this article. But actually good recruitment depends on some tried and tested techniques which, although they won’t get you the right person 100% of the time, will get you the right person significantly more often than if you don’t use them.

The other advantage of applying these techniques is that if you use them it doesn’t matter whether or not you’re naturally a “people” person or not. Even if generally you don’t feel you are very good at dealing with people, or that you’re not a very good judge of people, or it’s not something that interests you, there’s a logical process that you can learn and apply that will get you better results than you had before. And if you feel that you generally are a good judge of people, these tips will still improve your success rate in picking “winners” for your business.

What evidence is there to back up these assetions? Well, research has been done that – over time – measures the success of different methods of recruiting people to a whole range of organisations. Table 1 shows the predictive success rates of a variety of different ways of recruiting people. This is published research, and evaluates methods of recruiting quite independently of whether the people who are carrying out the recruitment are naturally good judges of people’s personalities.

You’ll see from this table that the best results come from doing an assessment centre. I spend a lot of my professional life designing and delivering assessment centres but I’m not going to describe them in detail here. That’s because they need to be designed and delivered by specialists and the purpose of this article is to give you a toolkit which you can take away and use yourself. You’ll see from the table that a structured interview will give you results that are still pretty good - much better than an unstructured interview – and that’s a process which, once I've taken you through it, you can start to put into practice yourself.

So, let’s look at the first step. What would you imagine would be the first step in recruiting someone?

Step 1: The Job Description

In order to write the job description, you first need to answer the following questions.

• What do you want this person to do?
• What will be their main duties, their responsibilities?
• What will their conditions of  employment be?

Be clear about how many hours they will work. Are their hours fixed or flexible? What holidays will they get?

When you have answered these questions for yourself, you have the basis for the job description.

Step 2: The Person Specification

When you’ve worked out what you want them to do, sit down and think carefully about what skills they will need to do this job.

This is an absolutely vital part of the process. Everything else that follows – your advertisement, your information pack, and the structure of your interview – flows from this. If you get this bit wrong, then you won’t get the right results at the end.

When you’ve identified the skills someone will require to do this job, you need to divide them into two categories: Essential and Desirable.

Essential skills are those which you must have when you walk through the door on Day One. Desirable skills are usually those which you need for the job but which the person can be trained in, or those which would be nice bonuses.

A good tip is to keep the Essential requirements as few as possible, consistent with the candidate being well enough qualified to do the job.

Why is that?

It’s because when you come to short-listing – and I’ll cover that in more detail later - you should really only short-list those who have all the essential requirements for the post. So when you’ve drawn up your list of Essential Skills, a good rule of thumb is: are there any requirements on this list which, if I had a good candidate who had all the other requirements for the post, I might say, “Well, OK, we could manage without that at the beginning.”?  If you’ve got anything on your Essential list in that category, you should move it to your Desirable list.

It is very important that all the requirements – essential and desirable - are job-related. This is to protect you from charges of unlawful discrimination. I’m not going to go into this in great detail here, but let me give you one or two examples.

If the job requires you to answer telephone calls, understand customer queries and maybe write simple letters or e-mails, then it is quite lawful to say, “A good standard of written and spoken English is required,” because you can justify that in terms of the post. What would be unlawful would be to say, “Applicants must have English as their first language,” because the you would risk discriminating illegally against people from ethnic minorities whose English was good enough to do the job, but for whom it was a second language.

Another example would be a job where physical strength was required. It is no longer lawful just to advertise for “a man”. You can advertise for “a strong individual capable of doing x and y,” and then set all applicants a physical test. This is lawful, provided that you give the same test to every applicant, and provided that you can demonstrate that the test is directly related to the requirements for the post.

Step 3: The Advertisement and Information Pack

When you’ve sorted out what you want the person to do, and what their terms of employment are going to be, it’s time to advertise your vacancy. You need to think about where you are going to place your advert, and that will depend on a number of things.

Think first about where your employee is going to come from. Are the skills you want likely to be available in the local workforce, or are you going to have to cast your net further afield? If you can find them locally, then an advert in the local paper, or even in a newsagents’ window, may be enough to attract a field of candidates.

If you need more specialist skills, then you might want to think about advertising in a trade journal or professional magazine. If you are recruiting someone with computing skills, might the Internet be best?

Your budget will also be a factor in your decision about where to advertise.

Here (Table 2) are some important points to include when you write the advertisement.

A recognisable job title – use a name that describes the role fairly and which people will recognise and understand. This means that sometimes you will need to use a more widely recognised job title, rather than the specialised or technical name for the role which you use internally in your business.

For example, my sister runs her own business providing a Braille proof-reading service. She needed to recruit someone to read print documents to her, a role that is technically known as a "copyholder". She recognised that some people who would be well able to do the job might not understand this term, so in her job advertisement, she asked for a "personal assistant".

Information about the location and the working environment – for example,  you might  state, "You will be working in a small industrial unit on the outskirts of Doncaster."

A brief description of the duties – and whether training will be provided.

Information about working patterns – specify whether the job is full- or part-time and whether  it involves any form of shift working, and state when the job is  to be done.  For example,  "We are looking  to appoint a part-time administrative assistant to work two mornings a week..."

Opportunity for an informal chat – this is very important. If you give people a chance to talk to you about what you’re looking for, they can make an informed decision about whether they are likely to be suitable. That means that you will waste less of your time reading through applications from people who either aren’t well matched to the job, or wouldn’t take the job even if you offered it.

You need to have an Information Pack ready to send out to people who are interested in applying. This isn’t as daunting as it sounds. Your aim should be to explain as clearly as possible about the background to the post, the main duties, the personal qualities and skills you would need to do the job, and how to apply.

Some jobs require an enhanced CRB disclosure. If this is the case, it is important that you spell this out up front, before people apply.

If you have any brochures about your company, or other information, like maps to show your location, you could put those in too.

When my sister was recruiting for the copyholder's post mentioned above, she placed an advertisement in the window of a local newsagent and booked a small ad for two weeks in the local daily newspaper. In response she had 53 enquiries, resulting in eight applications.

Which brings us on to the question of shortisting.

Step 4: Shortlisting the Applications

Discard any applicant who doesn’t have all the Essential qualities that you've asked for.

How many applications are left? Do you want to see everyone? If not, look at the Desirable qualities. Which of the applicants brings the most relevant extra experience? If you eliminate all the people with just the essential characteristics, do you have enough people to see?

As a rule you might aim to see between four and six people for a single vacancy.

Step 5: Planning the Interview Day

You also need to think about whether you are going to give applicants a tour of your premises and, if so, who is going to do that.

Ideally, you will have put the date of the interviews in your information letter, but you need now to write and tell your applicants where and when to come for interview. 

Ask them to confirm in writing or by phone or e-mail that they are able to attend, so that you’re not waiting around on the day for people who never intended to turn up.

Step 6: Planning and Conducting the Interview

This is where we get to the nitty-gritty of the process. The purpose of the interview is to gain evidence that the candidate has the skills and experiences that we have identified as being necessary to do the job well.

The best way to do this is to ask them for examples from their past experience that show they can do the things that you’ve asked for.

One key issue when you come to do this concerns the way you frame the questions. You need to ask open, not closed, questions.

A closed question is one that can be answered either “yes” or “no”. An open question is one that asks for information and which can't be answered simply by a "yes" or "no". If you want to find out about someone's skills and  experience, open questions get you the information you need much more quickly than closed ones.

Open questions begin with Who, What, Why, When, Where and require the person to tell us a lot more than a simple “yes” or “no.”

The structure of your interview should contain the following (Table 3):

• A welcome and thanks for attending
• An explanation of what is to happen
• Clearing up of any ambiguities in what the candidate wrote on the application form or CV 
• Questions about relevant skills and experience (sometimes called Competency-based Interviewing)
• An opportunity for the candidate to ask questions
• Thanks for attending, and an explanation of what happens next

It is very important that you ask all candidates the same questions, to give yourself the best possible chance of comparing them, and to be fair to all candidates.

Before the interview, plan and write out your questions to test candidates' skills and experiences against the person specification that you drew up. Make sure that you include some supplementary, “probing” questions designed to get beneath the surface of what people tell you.

It is important to take notes during the interview. It can be quite difficult to do this whilst you’re asking questions and listening attentively to the answers so, if you can, have a second person with you. Ask them to take the notes, or divide the questions and the note-taking between you to give a change of voice.

Step 7: Making your decision

After the interview, you need to review and evaluate the evidence you’ve collected. It will help you to make sense of what you’ve seen and heard if you give a score for each of the questions. I use the following five-point scale for this.

 
Be very strict with yourself. Allocate a mark for each question based on the evidence you heard. Don’t be surprised if some candidates are a mixture of good and bad marks. That just reflects real life – most of us are a mixture or strengths and weaknesses. Your ideal candidate will have a 3 or better on all the essential qualities. If you like, you can add up the marks to produce a rank order. If you’ve done all the previous steps correctly, then the candidate with the best score will normally be the best candidate for the post. If you have two candidates with very good scores, then you will need to think about what “extra” each candidate brings that might make one a better fit than the other.

If you don’t get anyone who fits the bill, don’t be afraid not to appoint. For all the reasons I outlined at the start of this article, it’s actually better to have no-one than the wrong someone.

If no one meets your requirements, you will need to review why you didn’t get the person you wanted. Were you looking for an unusual skill set? Was the salary right? Were the working conditions attractive? Did you advertise in the right place? Think about what you might be able to change that might get a better result next time, and start the process again.

Step 8: Telling the candidates and offering feedback

Once you’ve made up your mind who the best candidate is, phone them to offer them the post. Don’t contact any of the unsuccessful candidates until you have spoken to your first choice candidate.

If your first choice candidate turns you down, but you have a reserve candidate who can do the job, ring them and offer them the post.

Once a candidate has agreed to accept the post, then you need to agree a start date and send them an appointment letter, which will normally be “subject to references”. Get your candidate’s permission to approach their referees now. Be sure to take up references, as there is increasing evidence of CV and application fraud.

Phone the referees wherever possible – people are often cautious about what they will say in writing. Explain to each referee what the main duties are and seek their views on the person's suitability. If you have any lingering doubts or questions about one aspect of performance, then raise that with the referees directly.

Then you can write to the other candidates and tell them that they have not been successful. Always offer feedback.

Think what you will say if candidates ring you for feedback. Don’t get caught on the hop or you might say something unwise like “your face just didn’t fit." Tell them what they did well in the interview and suggest something constructive they can do for future interviews.

Once you’ve done all that, you should have covered all the angles. All you have to do is to induct and train your new employee – but that’s beyond the scope of this article!