Candidates today want to know a lot more about growth potential than their requirements and responsibilities. They want more than a job description mapping out what they are accountable for. Choosing a career is similar to finding a spouse, you don’t just marry anyone and you certainly don’t just take any job. Top performers are very thoughtful when it comes to making a career move.
If your organization is not focused on equality as part of its core mission, it should be. Part of every company’s values should mean treating all employees and customers with respect, regardless of their age, gender, race or any other differentiating factor.
Hiring people from diverse backgrounds will ensure that you are giving everyone equal opportunities. The reputation of your company depends on it.
Not only does a healthy culture create loyalty among your workforce, it also creates loyalty among your customers. Think about it – if you walk into a store and are greeted by happy, helpful employees, how likely are you to shop there again? Now just imagine that every single branch of that chain seems to have the same type of employees with cheerful attitudes. Don’t you automatically assume that the company must treat its employees well and care about its customers?
“Recruiting is hard. It’s just finding the needles in the haystack.” Steve Jobs
We could stop right there and pretty much sum up what it means to be a recruiter, but the fact is that so many people don’t have any idea just how challenging it can be. A recruiter wears many hats – salesperson, sleuth, strategist, problem-solver, negotiator, agent – and that’s just to name a few. But the really tricky part is actually changing these hats at key intervals throughout the recruiting process – some times during a single conversation!
True leaders are just that – leaders. They have learned to forge their own paths and make their own decisions. If you happen to have a corporate structure that makes all the decisions for its leadership teams, you are essentially creating a band of soldiers – not leaders. In order for them to flourish in the positions you’ve entrusted to them, they need to be challenged. Give them responsibility for major decisions. Present them with the challenges your company is facing and take their thoughts seriously.
If you are hiring quality, high-performing employees, they will need to be challenged and trusted continually in order to grow.
Knowing what is wrong with your company culture is only half the battle. Once you’ve assessed the potential issues, you need to make a plan to change it, and the best way to do this is to purposely choose your company culture.
Ideally, this choice is made before the company even launches, but in most cases, businesses aren’t even aware that this needs to be decided. In that case, it’s crucial that you sit down with your management team and lay out the foundations for the environment you wish to create.
By this point, hopefully you’ve gotten some good feedback and observations about employees and management and you know what you need to change.
These types of individuals are the reasons for such interview questions as, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Sure, we’ve all been conditioned to give certain responses to these questions, but to flesh out a high performer, dig a little deeper. Don’t just accept the stock answers. A high-performing individual will probably answer a little differently than anyone else. For example, he might say he sees himself owning his own company. This should never frighten off an employer because it means this individual has lofty goals and high expectations.
Even though this could mean you only have him for a period of time, consider the amount of growth your company can experience in that time and decide whether or not it’s worth the risk.
