Step 1 – Establish Your Employee Value Proposition

Tie your employment brand with your business strategy.Understand why people want to work for your organization and develop a programthat attracts more ideal candidates through your doors.

Recommended Reading: Attracting Perfect Customers: The Power of Strategic Synchronicity, by Stacey Hall and Jan Brogniez.

Step 2 – Establish a ‘Cracker Jack’ Candidate Sourcing Strategy

Do the work to find out where your ideal candidates are right now. Where do they hang out? What do they read? What do they do for fun?

Include Social Media tools, this means be a proactive social media presence. Have a credible, passionate, authentic person from your company talk to your ideal audience all the time, whether you are hiring or not. Provide value. Keep ideal candidates coming back for more, get them on your web site, create reasons for website and social media stickiness.

Be a talent scout. Enroll your team into scouting for additional contributors and mission critical players. Reward your people for quality recommendations.

Hire the right recruitment talent. Select your partners as wisely as you

select your teammates. There are a ton of ‘recruitment’ alternatives in the marketplace. Choose a partner who is committed to your end game and will do a great job surfacing, selecting and assisting you in on-boarding top tier people for your organization.

Step 3- Conduct a Role Analysis – Let the job talk.

Define performance criteria before you start searching. Sit down and work through the KPI’s, Core functions and specific Selection Criteria with the key stakeholders impacted by the success or failure of the hire. Predetermine the “who” in who you need to hire. What values do they honor? What is their work ethic? For that matter, what are their ethics? What are the non-negotiable competencies, behaviors and emotional intelligence levels required in the role?

Recommended reading: The Truth About Managing People and Nothing but the Truth. Stephen Robbins.

Step 4- Establish a hiring process that holds your hiring team accountable for selecting the best and eliminating the rest.

Create a process and choose to stick to it. All to often a great process is defined and then a decision maker meets someone who strikes their fancy yet clearly does not meet the selection metrics required. The decision maker calls the shots, ignores the very process they implemented and pulls the trigger only to discover that a slick talker with a good story has bamboozled them into paying way to much money for way too little in return.

Step 5 – Begin amplifying the employment brand during the hiring process.

Create reasons for the right people to choose your organization. Continuing creating points of engagement. You are asking a great deal of the candidate throughout your hiring process, so think about what you can give in return. Keep in mind; ‘on-boarding’ begins with the first ‘hello’.

Step 6- Make an Astute Selection

Whether you are utilizing assessments, competency and behavioral based interviewing, top grading interviewing modalities or group presentations; use tools and multiple dimensions to aid you in choosing the best person for your team. Get down to the top 3 candidates all whom have what you said you need, all who pass mustard in your process and then choose wisely. Conduct your due diligence; background checks and behavioral references, ensure your hire maximizes your brand and will forward your business.

Step 7 – Effective On Boarding

From the beginning of your relationship, ensure that your new hire fully understands the responsibilities and accountabilities of the role. In some circles, this is called up-front contracting of expectations and performance parameters.

Assign a mentor or a new hire ‘buddy’. Give the same credence to selecting the mentor as you did with hiring the mentee.

Start creating their future with the organization day one.

Know why your new employee chose you. Uncover what they need from you to stay engaged in the role and with the company. Learn what they need in terms of development and how they prefer to be managed, recognized and rewarded.

Establish a 90-day new hire integration plan. Include a session outlining the purpose of the company; it’s mission, vision and values and how the employees emulate that in their day-to-day activities. Request a welcome visit or a call from the CEO, corporate leaders and other mission critical teammates.