Recruiting the right staff

At Rus­sell & Rus­sell we can advise busi­ness­es in the Lanark­shire area on many aspects of busi­ness life. Here are some tips on recruit­ment…

Hir­ing new staff is cost­ly and time-con­sum­ing, but it is worth invest­ing the effort to get it right. With­out good peo­ple your busi­ness can­not suc­ceed, and for a grow­ing busi­ness, mak­ing the right recruit­ment deci­sions can be the dif­fer­ence between long-term suc­cess or fail­ure.

Con­se­quent­ly, you need a struc­tured process for recruit­ment. Here are some things to con­sid­er:

Identify exactly what you are looking for

Avoid get­ting swamped with piles of CVs. Talk to exist­ing staff and define the vacant role that needs to be filled. Then build a pic­ture of the ide­al can­di­date, and find which appli­cants most close­ly resem­ble this pic­ture.

Can you promote from within?

Pro­mot­ing an exist­ing staff mem­ber to fill a vacan­cy can save enor­mous cost and risk com­pared to exter­nal recruit­ment. But make sure that the employ­ee has suf­fi­cient abil­i­ty to cope.

Recruit people who are good with people…

If staff do not get on with each oth­er, or worse, the cus­tomers, it can only harm your prof­itabil­i­ty. Make this a key pri­or­i­ty when recruit­ing.

…But make sure that you are objective when interviewing

Struc­ture your inter­view process, take notes and be con­sis­tent. Lik­ing the per­son is not enough: you need to dis­cov­er how com­pe­tent they are. Open-end­ed ‘behav­iour­al’ ques­tions are good for deter­min­ing this: you ask can­di­dates to describe real-life sit­u­a­tions at work when they solved prob­lems sim­i­lar to the ones they might encounter in your busi­ness.

Offer staff recruitment incentives

Exist­ing staff might know good peo­ple who would be inter­est­ed in the job. Offer­ing a finan­cial incen­tive can save you a for­tune in recruit­ment agency costs.

Have an effective induction procedure

Ensure that all new staff have a for­mal induc­tion pro­gramme, intend­ed to make them famil­iar with their new job. This will pay great div­i­dends in the long term.

If you are in the Lanark­shire area and are look­ing for sup­port and advice from a team of pro­fes­sion­al accoun­tants and busi­ness advis­ers, con­tact Rus­sell & Rus­sell.