The U.S. is experiencing record low unemployment rates……
Of course you have heard. Not only is it all over the news but you are feeling the pain. You can’t find any candidates, especially good ones. You have an employee who shows up, but that’s about it — but at least it’s a body, right? In the last 10 years, your standards of employee performance has gone from ‘do they do a great job’ to ‘does a mirror fog up if I hold it in front of their face?’ Hopefully it’s not that bad, but still…..
What you haven’t heard in all the news reports is what to do about it. How do you get applicants? How do you find employees? How do you hire and retain the employees that are actually driving the performance of your business?
Apply Your Marketing Skills to Your Hiring Process
I read once that innovation is not coming up with something new, it’s having a new way to apply something you already know. You already know marketing — how to find, attract and retain customers. Now, take those concepts and apply them to your hiring process.
One key marketing concept is identifying your ideal customer avatar. Who is your ideal customer? What problems do they have? How can you solve them? Where do they hang out? Who do they hang out with? What are they searching for online?
Now, apply this to employees. Who is your ideal employee? What are their needs? Where do they hang out? Who do they hang out with? What do they enjoy? The answers to these questions will help you determine what to say in your job postings and where to place your job postings.
Now this requires a paradigm shift. It requires you to think of your employees as customers. Wait? What? Many business owners and HR employees we have spoken to have the philosophy that the employees will get a paycheck if they do what they are told — a basic business transaction. Can you imagine only looking at your customers as a basic business transaction? No! If you did, it would probably be the one and only time you would because they will go somewhere else. We are in a time where basic business transactions don’t keep customers and basic business transactions won’t find employees.
Different times create different challenges which require different solutions. But the great part is that typically the different solutions end up being a great solutions in general. The actions you take to find and retain employees during this period of low unemployment, will continue to set you apart from other employers and make you even more effective during times of high unemployment. These are just good business practices.
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