5 top tips: recruiting to retain

Effective recruitment is a two-way process. You’ll take confidence in that the employee has the right skills, values and personality to fit in and get the job done, and the employee can make an informed decision as to whether your business is one that’ll help them prosper.

The result? You’ll have employees that want to stick around, minimising any financial, time and productivity wastage.

We spoke to Jenny Ware, our HR Business Partner, and asked her to share her five top recruitment tips…

1. Don’t just recruit any candidate to fill the role, take your time to find the right person. We appreciate this is easier said than done when you have positions to fill and jobs that need doing, but compromising on quality isn’t the answer. Often, it’ll only backfire down the line if the employee up sticks and leaves – so try to think of the bigger picture when recruiting.

2. While a prospective employee’s capability and technical skills are unarguably an essential part of the process, don’t ignore things like their values and personality. Giving equal priority to understanding their behaviours and cultural fit is a vital part of ensuring they’ll bed into your business.

Handy hints:

• Ask candidates questions about how they’d handle specific situations, rather than focusing solely on their technical knowledge.
• Refrain from hypothetical questions, and ask specific questions that’ll reveal more about the individual. For example, ‘tell me about a time when’, instead of ‘how would you respond to this situation’.
• Try to get an understanding of how the candidate would fit in with the team and business’ culture – if it isn’t a great fit, it’s likely to cause problems down the line.

3. Don’t base the recruitment decision on the opinions of one decision maker. Whether it’s a couple of you sitting in the interview or asking colleagues to meet the candidate, try to involve at least two people in the process. This’ll give you greater insight into how the candidate gels with others in the business, and how you think they’d fit in.

4. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Of course, you need to sell your business and the role itself, but be realistic. If you make the set-up sound like something it isn’t, you’ll only increase your odds of losing the employee and having to start the entire recruitment process again from scratch – which’ll be both time and money consuming.

5. Just be honest. If there are negatives, like shift working, unsociable hours or working bank holidays, tell them. It’s better for everyone if the candidate knows in advance and can make an informed decision. That way, if they decide to join you anyway, you’ll minimise the chances of facing problems at a later date.

What they want

We spoke to a pool of employees to find out what’s most important to them when going through the recruitment process. Here’s what they said:

In case you missed it, we recently uncovered that 50% of the working population are looking to leave their current job in the next 12 months. For more information on what’s pushing them to look elsewhere, and what attracts them to a prospective employer, head here.