The Ultimate Recruiting Playbook to Make Your Small Business A Talent Magnet
You’re only as good as your people. One of your biggest points of leverage in any business is the talent you attract and retain. However, many companies struggle to find and hire great candidates. This article is going to break down the strategies I’ve used to help small business owners 10x their hiring pipeline and hire better employees.
Table of contents:
Writing job ads that open up your pipeline
Writing inclusive job descriptions
How to interview candidates the right way
Writing job ads that open up your pipeline
You need to create a recruiting process that opens your organization up to incredible talent.
It’s better to focus on the skills you need rather than years of experience. For example, if you own a legal firm and need to hire a legal assistant, you’re going to be tempted to look for people with “legal assistant” on their resume.
But do you really need someone who graduated with two years of a college diploma that says legal assistant on it? Or do you need somebody who can do the skills of a legal assistant?
I can tell you it's the latter.
“The job ad should be a beacon for the right candidate, not a resume matching contest”
And when I can break it down to the skills, I now create a hiring pool that's infinitely larger than you can imagine. Take the legal assistant example: As soon as we figured out that we needed someone who is curious, hyper-detailed, and can write well, that opened up a whole other host of possible candidates—journalist students, history, students, political science students. There happens to be a lot of them looking for work.
Now imagine if you can take that skill set, distill it, and put it in the market. You have probably just 10x the number of candidates who can apply for the job.
When it comes to hiring, there's an old adage that says, “Hire for the soul and train for the role,” and I live by that.
Writing inclusive job descriptions
Too many job descriptions require an extensive list of specific technical skills and years of experience, which can discourage high-performing candidates from applying.
Folks, this does two things to you that set you at a disadvantage.
It demotivates potential high performers with the right attitudes from applying.
Women will not apply to jobs that they do not feel they are technically proficient in.
Why did I just say women? Because it's been proven over and over and over again.
And so here's what we know about high-performing teams: they’re diverse. Research shows that diverse teams, especially those with near 50-50 gender splits, perform better.
So, write job ads that invite a broader range of candidates instead of narrowing them down based on specific experience.
Of course, this may vary depending on the certificates and qualifications you need, but many of you are posting for technical skills that aren’t actually required, and by so doing, you’re eliminating a great number of otherwise excellent candidates.
We understand that diversity is a strength, but it also requires us to consciously look for it and nurture that difference if we're gonna get the best out of it.
Part of that starts in the hiring process and the most important thing is to make sure that your job ad caters to a large enough pool of candidates so that you can start to see and experience that diversity in the interview process.
How to interview candidates the right way
A lot of times the people who are phenomenal in interviews are terrible on the job, and the inverse is normally true as well—those who are terrible in interviews might be damn good on the job.
So you need to look past who are the good talkers and ask the right questions to evaluate who will truly be great once they join your company.
I evaluate candidates on the six “E”s:
Energy
Do they show up? Do they have a little bounce in their step? Are they excited? Do they have energy?
Energize
Do they leave you feeling uplifted after a conversation? This is not a difficult one. You're going to get off that call and feel one of two things; Either ‘holy geez, I hope I never have to have a conversation with them again’, or ‘I enjoyed that. I'd like to have another conversation.’
Edge
Edge means they've done more than the bare minimum and have scratched beneath the surface. Perhaps they've called some of your clients and past employees to ask about what it's like to work there. They've discovered some of your keynotes or YouTube videos, or they've just put in some extra effort to understand you better.
Ask them questions to figure out how deep they dug before the interview.
Execute
In this world, you will run into a lot of people who have energy, who energize you and love to research—but you will run into fewer people who execute.
And there's a very easy way to figure out if someone can execute. Just ask them about their last three personal projects.
They will invariably describe all of the trials and tribulations that came along with those projects. Look for the ones who got it done despite all the odds. Here you’ll see if they overcame challenges or made excuses.
Ethics
You’re looking for an alignment in values. Again, you want a difference in opinion and experience. But if you have a values conflict in your organization, you won't really ever be able to get over that. Ethics are critical in an organization. This will require a little bit of work, but two or three questions will get you there.
Empathy
In the run of a day, we all have hundreds of interactions. Any one of those interactions could rub you the wrong way.
People with empathy react differently. They take a step back. They understand more than just your words. They think about how you must be feeling at that moment. What must be going on in your world? They will make space. They will hold space.
When I look at the six Es, all of them are important, but execution and empathy are critical. And if I don't have ethics alignment, it's never going to work.
Here's a three-step interview approach that I recommend incorporating into your process:
“Get to know you" interview where you gauge the candidate's personality and interactions.
Technical interview to assess whether the candidate can do the work.
Team interview determines how the candidate interacts with the existing team.
Interview 1: Get to know you
The first one is to help you understand who they are as a person and how they interact. Think of this as your first crack at the six Es.
Interview 2: Technical
The second interview is designed to understand if they can do the work. So how do you create the circumstance to understand how well they can do the work? We take a cross-section of the team and put them in a room to have a conversation. That conversation is all geared around whether or not the people who are already on your team think this person would be a good addition.
Interview 3: Team
Your team conversation should be designed around what attributes they will bring to the team that we don't already have.
What kind of difference will they bring?
What kind of positive conflict?
What different viewpoints?
What different skill sets?
It's important in this environment that you already celebrate differences because what you don't want is what happens to so many teams; Managers hire people who look and act a lot like them. That is not going to be helpful in the long term.
And at the end of that conversation, you need a roundup individually. By the way, be very careful here. Do not allow this group of employees to talk among themselves and come to a conclusion because groupthink will happen.
You want to talk individually with each one to get a recap of what they thought and if there were any yellow or red flags.
Yellow flags are bound to be there. Nobody’s perfect. Some of these yellow flags may warrant a follow-up conversation with the candidate to clarify some things. But what you should be looking for is red flags.
And if there are red flags, we don't question it. They don't go to the next stage.
Conclusion
The recruitment process is more than just finding a person to fill a position; it's about discovering and engaging the right talent that aligns with your organization's values and needs. By focusing on a thoughtful talent acquisition strategy, writing inclusive job descriptions, and employing effective interview techniques, you'll open your organization to a more diverse and qualified pool of candidates.
The six E's provide a framework to identify talent that will not only contribute technically but also elevate your team's culture and performance. Remember, a well-structured recruitment process isn't just about filling roles—it's about building teams that will drive your organization forward with energy, empathy, and execution.
Take the time to refine your recruitment process and embrace diversity as a strength. Do this and you'll be poised to build a team that thrives on differences, embraces challenges, and achieves excellence together.