Our topic for this month, for the blogs and newsletter, is “The shrinking recruitment pool.” During covid, the advent of people working from home changed the whole working mindset for many. People have become less motivated, and the kind of personnel you want for your company—sales and otherwise—have become increasingly harder to find.
Potential personnel didn't base these mindset changes on their own ideas. It just happened that, as an evolution of the pandemic environment, some people found they could make more money by taking unemployment along with stimulus payments. They became willing to accept less than they were truly capable of.
There are apparently many people without jobs today, that might be recruits for the many companies seeking to hire. As we pointed out in our last blog post, those aren’t necessarily the people you want to hire. We provided five primary characteristics you want to watch for when hiring.
In taking these characteristics into account in today’s employment environment, your interview process must change. Before the pandemic, you might have been mainly looking for a person’s experience in the interview. Today, though, you want to make sure that the person you’re looking at isn’t trying to get a job just long enough to collect unemployment, and then go back home and live off unemployment and stimulus payments.
A great way to approach an interview today is to begin with two questions:
1) What was your biggest challenge in 2020?
Follow that up with
2) How did you overcome that?
It’s unlikely that they’ll tell this truth in such a situation, but the answers that would make your job applicant unemployable would run along the lines of:
1) “My biggest challenge was figuring out how to stay home and play video games, but still, eat and still pay the rent.”
2) “I found a loophole in the system and still got paid.”
We’re currently working with two companies near our Utah headquarters and recently revised their interview processes as above. We’ve been sitting in on some of the interviews to see how well the questions worked. Interestingly, the people being interviewed will sit back in their chairs, scratch their heads, and really have to think about their answers.
You can ask other thought-provoking questions, too—the idea being to bring forth their actual answers on how they’ll perform on a job.
You can then tie applicants’ answers back into the five characteristics we discussed in the last blog post and see how they line up. Just as a reminder, they are:
1. Communication—the person should have high communication skills.
2. Willingness to learn—The last thing you want in a recruit—or anyone for that matter—is someone who “knows it all already.” They must be willing to learn about your business, the field, and the particular role they’re going to have.
3. Positive attitude—Any recruit you decide upon should have a positive attitude about the job, about production, and about life in general.
4. Results-driven—You want someone who will be a producer and be motivated by results.
5. Alignment with core values—You want a recruit who can agree with your company's goals, especially your core values.
Back to this month's newsletter, click here: https://mailchi.mp/b1df2851f7f1/the-dangerously-shrinking-recruitment-pool
