To the successful business owner, hiring and delegating tasks to people with suitable skills is essential if the business is to grow and prosper. Most business owners will understand the importance of getting outside help but what many don’t understand is that there is a science behind it. Most large organisations have a separate department to look after recruitment, induction, training and retention of staff and for good reason. Good people are an organisation’s greatest resource and the process of finding them deserves attention.
In our previous business, we decided to set up a sales call-centre towards the end of our first year of operation. We put a lot of effort into our recruitment drive and after eighteen months, we had five consultants selling our products over the phone. In order to find and keep five successful sales professionals, we hired and fired 31 others! The direct costs of that process included recruitment firm charges, advertising, salaries to ineffective staff and termination payouts. On top of that were the intangible losses including interview time and unknown missed sales opportunities. Consequently the business lost in excess of $300,000 that year! It was a very expensive lesson to learn and we realised that we urgently needed to do something about our process or face closing our doors.
Soon afterwards, we hired a consultant who spent 6 weeks with us and eventually provided us with a working approach to recruiting sales people. Our recruiting toolkit now consisted of:
-
A position description
-
A well written, targeted job advertisement
-
A structured interview format which provided a set of pertinent questions
-
A manual containing a competency model detailing what to look out for in potential candidates.
While this was being developed, I wrote a new training manual, which included a lot more detail and increased our training days from three to five. We also provided much more experiential training such as face-to-face and telephone role-play exercises.
A couple of months and about $20,000 later, we ended up with a formalised recruitment and training model. While we found it impossible to get it right every time, we drastically reduced staff turnover which effectively turned the company around.
Inexperienced business owners often believe the process of getting staff will be the ‘easy’ part of running a business when in fact it can be one of the most difficult. When it comes to looking for quality staff, ‘Good people are hard to find!’ You can be certain that the person you need does exist and you need to have a process in place to find them and make sure they end up working for you – not your competition!
Previous Page Table of Contents Next Page