Since you’re reading this, we probably don’t need to convince you how important hiring the right people is for the success of your company. The right hire can mean incredible growth, can transform your culture, or turn things around when they aren’t exactly looking up. The wrong hire, we know, is a big cost to your company—impacting your customers, your investors, and your team’s productivity and morale. It’s a lot of pressure. So, to help you out, we’ve created an insider’s guide with what the best companies are doing this year.
1) Over Worked Employees
Employers who spread extra workload across their existing staff rather than adding additional staff, can quickly see a drop in safety awareness and productivity. Additionally, Employees working prolonged overtime or long hours can quickly become overwhelmed, unmotivated, and less alert on the job.
In addition to a loss of productivity due to fatigue and lack of motivation, over worked employees are more likely to become ill or suffer from a work related injury causing more downtime for the employer.
2) Paid Advertising is expensive to manage
The advertising market for employment is saturated (think of how Monster and CareerBuilder have fallen from their former status as useful tools), and in advertising a position, the only people you’ll turn up are those actively seeking work. Companies hire entire department that focus 100% on how to advertise their business. This department is not cheap to implement and takes a lot of experience to truly advertise effectively.
3) Wasting money on-boarding wrong candidates
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average direct cost for a new employee is $57,967.88 including basic wages, benefits, and taxes. Add in costly overtime during the vacancy of the position, recruiting and advertising costs, screening and testing costs, and this number can quickly grow exponentially. Ultimate Group can provide you with a predictable cost per hire and many offer financial guarantees to support the quality of their talent. In addition to cost per hire savings, employees contracted through Ultimate Group fall under the Ultimate Group’s unemployment and worker’s compensation claims. This can quickly decrease costly overhead due to injuries and employee turnover.
4) Not always looking to hire
When is the best time to hire that next person? When you find them! Ask any company where most of their hires came from or ask bigger companies where their best people came from and the answer is usually the same: friends, friends of friends or ex-colleagues. It’s all about networks for one simple reason: good people know good people.
5) Not enough time to recruit the needed talent
According to NACE, the average time from interview to offer is 22.5 days. Add the additional time of position analysis, posting the position, accumulating resumes, reviewing resumes, and scheduling interviews and you’ve quickly lost a large amount of time. Industry specialized staffing agencies have a pool of qualified and screened candidates for their positions of specialization. Ultimate Group also works closely with passive candidates in their niche market, giving you access to a wider range of qualified talent. Having a partner that is proactive rather than reactive in the recruiting process quickly cuts your costly down time and additional burden on other employees within the organization.You need to have exceptional recruiting skills when dealing with passive candidates. Even if corporate recruiters have similar ability, due to their workload, they just don’t have the time to invest in passive candidate recruiting.
6) You only know who you know
Top passive candidates, especially those with three or more years of experience, seek out the best third-party recruiters to keep them aware of opportunities at different companies. This is a huge advantage over corporate recruiters who only represent one company.
7) Not having a flexible employee schedule
Whether your need for a temporary employee is to cover a vacation, medical leave, or an unexpected increase in workload, having Ultimate Group as a partner can quickly provide you with additional resources during your time of need. Ultimate Group often work with professionals and skilled workers who are open to short term, project, or part time work that have strong backgrounds in their field. Having experienced talent that can quickly come in and adapt to your position can provide you with great flexibility.
8) Employer Branding
Smart companies typically operate in competitive talent markets. This means that the people you’re looking for are likely to be juggling several job offers.It can be done but first you have to realise that hiring is marketing.We live in what’s called the “age of transparency”. It has never been easier for employees to be able to tell who you are or what working with you would be like. Digital platforms mean that even the youngest companies can affordably showcase why they’re an exciting place to work. There’s more to this than just posting your jobs in the news paper. Everything you do or say is building your brand.
9) Hiring C players rather than A and B players
Look to hire people you think you can’t get. You’ll be surprised and once you’ve got the first few heroes it will become a lot easier to attract more of them. This is not a luxury. It seems obvious to punch above your weight but a successful company will continually shift up the weight categories. If you don’t get these people you’ll get stuck.
10) Hiring to Hire
You’re not hiring to fill a job, you’re building a company. Make the first 20 hires deliberately with the future in mind. Don’t hire people just because they’re good in general and available. These kinds of opportunistic or bad hires. The cost of a pointless hire has been put at between $25k-$50k. That’s money that most companies cannot afford to waste. Beyond the cost of getting it wrong, your first few hires will set the tone for the future. Getting it right will make something that’s intrinsically hard a lot easier.
11) Hire for Potential
A successful company will quickly outgrow everyone’s current skills and roles. If things work out as intended it’s going to grow and morph unpredictably. So will the demands on your employees. One of the most exhausting aspects of companies is this constant evolution, or as some founders call it “keeping up with their own company”. While it can be fairly simple to assess a candidate’s current skills rating their potential is less so. Look for people coming into their professional prime. The past is a good guide, so take into account lifetime achievements whether they’re jobs, schools or hobbies.
12) Hiring Process
One of the biggest mistakes made when hiring for a company is to think that just because you’re small you don’t need a process. If you think “process” means doing things slowly then think again. Get the right tools, remember to hire as a team and you will stay on track. The hiring process is a funnel — you get a lot of applicants, you speak with some of them, you meet a few of them, you hire the one you like best. An efficient filtering process will save you and your candidates time.
The question you are probably asking yourself is if every company in the construction industry are having these problems how can my company get ahead of the curve?!? You can follow the helpful hints we have put together above, or if you need a little more help when it comes to hiring the right workforce give Ultimate Group a call and see if we can’t help grow your company!
