According to the job site Monster, companies spend on average about £4,500 recruiting a new employee.
I think that’s conservative when you consider agency fees and the time and effort that goes into finding a good candidate.
There’s also lots of evidence to suggest we’re nowhere near as good at gauging candidates, as we think we are, even when you bring things like psychometric profiling into the mix.
What troubles me is the cost of failure. The costs when it doesn’t work.
It can be difficult to come into a new company and fit with all its entrenched positions and unique culture.
Human beings are uncomfortable in the unfamiliar and people will often freak out after a few months and either go back to their old company or go somewhere else.
You end up with this washing machine effect, continually replacing people.
One of my clients in a service industry was constantly recruiting and explored the idea of me providing coaching support to anyone new into the company…
…to help them and give them a sounding board for someone to talk to about what they were struggling with.
Now we seem to be in an employee’s market where there are more jobs out there than there are employees to fill them. This is an important dynamic in recruitment.
But what if the answer to the challenge that you’re trying to fix with recruitment is right under your nose?
What if there is someone with latent, not fully uncovered talent who could step up into the role you want them to step into.
When I worked at Tesco’s, we had a secretary in the typing pool in my called Julie. She was by most accounts, lazy, had a bad attitude and was often late or sick.
One day Julie applied for a much bigger supervisory role outside of the department and she was successful.
Off she went to set up a new department in the HR function (the irony of which was not lost on us).
A few months later, I bumped into her quite early in the morning and that was a surprise because I’d never seen her before nine o’clock.
I asked her how the new job was getting on. She said, “I’m working 12-hour days because we’re so busy setting everything up and recruiting, but I’m really enjoying it”.
Julie was on the right bus, but in the wrong seat. The role she had, wasn’t giving her enough to drive her forward.
What if you’ve got a Julie sat in your business who, with the right degree of development and transformation could step up and do a much bigger role for you?
Wouldn’t that be something worth investing in?
