Michelle Rodger: Recruiting and retaining, not hiring and firing

Published on Saturday 9 January 2010 15:41

ONE of the hardest challenges when running your own business is finding the right people to share your dreams and ambitions who will work just as hard as you to achieve them. Even harder is keeping such rare creatures motivated, trained, rewarded and on your payroll rather than your competitor's.

What's interesting about the whole employment process is the difference between hiring and recruiting.

According to Seth Godin, business guru and blog king: hiring is what you do when you let the world know that you're accepting applications from people looking for a job. Recruiting is the act of finding the very best person for a job and persuading them to stop doing what they're doing and come and join you.

Hiring, he says in a recent blog, is easy and fast, and basically a retail operation. Recruiting is artful and slow and essentially direct marketing.

Fiona Irvine, founder of Rainbow HR, says hiring is typically used for more volume and transactional type recruitment, such as hotel or restaurant staff in high-turnover roles. Recruitment is more structured and refers to the whole candidate experience.

She believes recruitment, as opposed to hiring, gives the opportunity to engage and communicate with both the client and the candidate and deliver what she calls "the warmth of welcome" often missing from the process.

"It is essential to treat every application with care," insists Irvine. "From the way you correspond in terms of the offer, the keeping in touch before the person starts and any pre-boarding, where you start the induction long before the person walks through the door, either with online company information or simply having lunch with the new team."

Expanding your team is usually seen as a necessity rather than luxury, but it's definitely an opportunity.

Specialist recruiter Roddy Hammond says the difference between hiring and recruiting has strengthened the business case for his new venture; an international teacher recruitment agency which helps Scottish teachers progress their careers by taking up a position with an international school.

Making a move overseas is more complicated than just accepting a job offer, says Hammond, who needs to spend a significant time with candidates to make sure they choose the best school and location for their situation.

He believes the smartest recruiters can quickly adapt to market their clients' opportunities. "The recruiter will need to be tuned in to the latest technology to ensure they save their clients time and money, and ensure they find the best person every time," he says.

After 20 years in recruitment, Hammond is experienced in adapting the recruitment/marketing mix given the available media, but says it has become a more complex process in recent years.

Harnessing new technology also brings myriad problems, with many online recruiters failing to deliver on customer service by treating job applicants in an offhand manner, says Peter Gillespie, managing director of Search.co.uk.

Gillespie claims a group of Scottish job seekers told him recently that they don't expect a response any more when they apply for positions advertised online. He says most organisations claim their employees are their most important asset. So why not show it from the start? Recruitment processes should focus on more than just simple selection (hiring). They should be seen as a way to communicate with candidates.

"Organisations which follow best practice, treating potential employees fairly, will benefit from a more loyal and committed future workforce," he says. "And they'll enhance rather than damage that much talked about 'employer brand' and make it easier to attract future talent."

Whether you're hiring or recruiting you're going to have to work a lot harder to persuade new talent to sign up. Employees aren't convinced that job prospects are any brighter in 2010. Recent survey results from the Home Learning College show that 74 per cent of British adults do not see their employment prospects improving this year. Indeed, 10 per cent think prospects will worsen before they improve.

Looking on the positive side, for the 9 per cent who didn't think prospects would get worse, how will job searching change this year? The experts say we can expect more video CVs rather than paper ones and more use of social media and online networking, but there's still space for face-to-face interviewing and quality customer service.

So the message is this: when looking to expand your team this year, focus on recruiting and retaining, rather than hiring and firing, and you won't go wrong.