Your Guide to Successful Recruitment
by Julia Beeby, Lead HR Consultant
Start with your values
When looking to recruit new members to your team, it’s important that you find someone who will fit in well with your culture, so you continue to work in line with your vision and deliver the same aspirations.
Value based recruitment works on the principle of you prioritising specific values resulting in you being more likely to achieve a good fit for your organisation. This in turn creates a positive working environment, improves staff morale, increases employee engagement, reduces employee turnover and increases productivity.
Where to start?
The first step is to map out your company values and the drivers behind them.
For us at Grounded HR, our driving principle is Compassionate HR.
This is driven from our experiences in the HR field, knowing how we want to work, how we wish to treat our clients and also how our clients wish to treat and interact with their staff.
Once your value mapping starts to take shape, you can follow these values so they translate through to the job you are recruiting for. This will make creating the job advert, person and job specification a much easier task.
You may want to use a personality questionnaire or situation judgment tests which can play some part in gaining insight but should not be taken as read. Any tests should be used in combination with various value-based interview techniques.
Getting the basics right
Although its the early months of 2023 the financial year is due to come to a close soon.
Has your budget for recruitment changed over the last 12 months and what budgets are you thinking about for 2023/2024 in terms of growing your people resource?
Maybe you’re at the point where you are ready to take on your first employee – Congratulations if you are!
Getting the basics right with recruitment will help you to be clear on what you want to achieve, enabling you to not only attract the right candidates, but also retain them.
The Recruitment Journey
The recruitment journey starts with understanding what skill set you need to add value to the business. The best way to do this and to order your own thoughts is to develop a job description and person specification.
All to often we come across businesses who have not given due consideration to this first step which can lead to a mismatch of candidates, differences in expectations and in some cases capability and poor performance issues.
Formulating a good job description and person specification helps you to be clear on what your expectations are for the role and identify what skill set you need to attract when advertising.
For a candidate a job description helps them see how they can match their experience and skills to the role available and see areas for growth in their self development and career.
When doing a job description and person specification you also need to evaluate the market and ensure your expectations and what remuneration and rewards you’ve budgeted for are in line with the supply and demand.
If there is a gap between what your expectations are and the package you are offering, i.e. the candidate expectation of the market, you will not attract the right individual or may find yourself in a situation where you’re unable to retain staff as you become a ‘stop gap’ until they are offered something better.
At Grounded HR we can guide you on creating job descriptions and person specifications. We offer reward and job evaluation consultations. This service can help you salary benchmark and understand the rewards that are valued within the current job market and your sector of operations.
Get in touch today at hello@groundedhr.co.uk