One of the biggest struggles businesses have faced recently is the struggle to find employees. The landscape for finding good workers has become very competitive across all industries. It seems there isn’t a street or business where you don’t see signs about hiring now, or workers needed.
And it isn’t getting any easier. According to a recent CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey covering the first quarter of 2022. 52% of all small business owners said that it has gotten harder to find qualified people to hire compared to a year ago.
So how do you find people to be a part of your team or company? Where are they?
Look around you. You want others who would be focused on helping build your business. People who are engaging, motivated and create memorable experiences. They should be on your team. Stop looking so hard and look at who’s around you.
Think about who you come across in a day. Where do you all go each day, week, or month?
Bank, grocery store, coffee shops, restaurants, retail stores, gym and so on.
Others you see or meet at sporting events, social gatherings and school activities.
Now look for the WOW experiences. Who gives them? People who leave a meaningful impact on you during a sales or servicing related experience, in person or over the phone. These are the people who leave you saying;
I enjoyed working with them, I’ll do business with them again.
They made that easy
They seem very nice
What a great problem solver
I wish they worked for me, or with me.
Target these people! If you come across people that you say this about and you aren’t hiring at the moment, or have an opening, be sure you add their information in a people to hire file.
This gives you the names of people to add to your team or business at anytime. Maintain contact with them. Maybe every few months you make a point to see them. You have rapport, you know where they are and then when the time is right, you’re able to make it work.
Your current team. What do you have in place for your current team to find talent to bring to your company? People like to work with friends. If anyone knows the abilities of a person and what traits they would bring your company, wouldn’t their close friend be the perfect person to give insight? This also has your team keeping an eye out for WOW experiences in every person they come across in their daily life.
Giving a worthwhile bonus if you hire someone they refer, now makes them think about working with their friends. Look at the lifetime value of a hire. It’s worth making it a worthwhile bonus. Make it a large bonus! It motivates and then it’s always in the back of their mind.
Job postings are overrated. Job postings only appeal to people who are out looking for a job. How do you appeal to people who are high performers in their current job and aren’t scouring job posting sites or replying to a billboard advertising a certain hourly wage? If someone is replying to your hourly wage advertisement on a billboard, they’re basing their decision solely on the price per hour your company is offering. If you advertise and make it about an hourly wage, that’s what your prospective employee will be solely focused on. The company offering the most money doesn’t always win.
Friends and friendships. Much of the consensus has always been don’t hire friends, or be friends with employees. I’ve always had a different view of that and often refer to the story of PayPal and the PayPal Mafia. Here is a clip from an article in TechRepublic on hiring friends and friendship by PayPal.
“When we started PayPal, I remember one of the early conversations I had with Max [Levchin] was that I wanted to build a company where everybody would be really great friends and, no matter what happened with the company, the friendships would survive,” former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel said. “In some ways that was very utopian. We didn’t only hire our friends, but we did hire people that we thought we could become really good friends with.”
Many of those friendships began at Stanford. Keith Rabois, David O. Sacks, Reid Hoffman, and Ken Howery all attended Stanford around the same time and most were subsequently recruited by Thiel to work for PayPal. Max Levchin recruited some developers and former classmates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as well.
What’s unique is that the majority of the early PayPal employees, and the PayPal Mafia in general, were all recruited through a friendship network and not by a headhunter. Sacks said that these people were “cut from the same cloth.” This, he said, explained how they all had such a strong entrepreneurial focus to begin with.
If that was the mindset and one of the founding principles for the greatest collection of entrepreneurial talent of all-time, it should be good enough for every small and large business.
Hire for the person, not the role. Quit waiting and looking for only people who check all the boxes in what you want for a specific role. In a different hiring environment this was possible. Now it isn’t. Stop being so picky. There is always a place for people who are honest, driven, loyal, hard-working etc. This may be friends or close acquaintances. Many of these attributes are not trainable or coachable. They're natural human attributes that people possess.
The right people are eager to learn and be trained. If you only hire on crossing ever t and dotting every i, on job descriptions, work history, education etc. you’re going to continue to struggle finding people.
These were some tips to help you find and identify people to talk with. I wrote about some hiring ideas on convincing and attracting talent to your company in a past post, Hire For a Career, Not a Job.
Don’t make the process of finding employees so hard. Remember, look at the people around you.
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