‘Their stupid portal insisted I nominate a salary. I felt like putting in $0, just to shut them up!’
‘No way would I ever work for them! He had a gun in his desk drawer!’
‘Steve’s technically very good, but he’s so negative at the moment. He’s dragging everyone else down around him.’
Want to gain the upper hand when it comes to attracting top candidates?
Not sure what reputation your organisation enjoys?
Want to revitalise unhappy or unmotivated employees?
Here are three hacks to set you straight in an environment where excellent employees have the upper hand and you want them to choose you AND stay with you.
Hack #1: ‘A person’s a person, no matter how small.’ Dr Zeuss
Clean up your Recruitment Portal. It affects your ability to attract great candidates.
Most of my clients apply for roles directly via an organisation’s portal at least once. And, from their reports, it’s clearly not fun.
Think how you feel when you buy something from a clunky website. You might put up with it because you really need that product, but you’re still amazed at how unskilled, naive and primitive their understanding of the online buying process seems to be.
Do you really want prospective employees to think that about your online portal and perhaps about your organisation?
What are the complaints I hear about these online portals?
- How long and laborious the process is.
Have you timed how long it takes to apply for one of your positions online? - Intrusive questions that are none of the employer’s business and not relevant.
Many sites ask the applicant to list their current salary. My clients don’t want to provide this information, for valid reasons. Further, they worry they will not be considered for the role if their salary is ‘wrong’. - Questions that force an answer, where it is not reasonable for the applicant to know the answer.
Some websites insist that the person nominate a salary but do not provide enough information in the job ad for the applicant to ascertain where the role is likely to sit in the marketplace. - Questions that force the applicant into nominating a salary at the first stage of the process.
You could argue that the employer has a legitimate right to uncover salary details so that they don’t waste their time on a candidate who will be too expensive. Most candidates understand this issue has to be addressed at some stage. However, they expect that it should happen further down the track, when both parties have more information. - One size fits all.
One of my recent clients was a seasoned Executive. She found many of the questions on one site clearly aimed at blue-collar mining employees with inappropriate content.
Here are a couple of suggestions that could improve your organisation’s portal AND reputation.
- Think through your philosophy. The best employer-employee relationships are a partnership, not a dictatorship. This isn’t only about what you want to achieve. It’s about having prospective employees respect your organisation’s savvy and feeling that you value them and their time.
- Engage an external party to conduct an audit of your online portal.
One final point. Whether you use an online portal or not, don’t take too long over the Recruitment process. Recently, one of my clients was kept waiting for three months!
Apparently, the Board was interfering in the process, even though the role didn’t even report directly to the CEO. This delay and interference by the Board worried my client. Was it a dysfunctional Board? Why didn’t they have confidence in their management team to make decisions? Was the CEO effective? How enjoyable would it be on a daily basis to work in such an organisation?
My client moved on and accepted another role. You can imagine how many people he told along the way.
Smart organisations understand that good applicants have a lot of power in the marketplace. These organisations show respect to applicants at all stages of the recruitment process, especially in the areas where there is no human face to overcome the bad impression that a poor recruitment portal can cause.
What does your online portal say about you as an employer?
Hack #2. ‘Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip’. Will Rogers
Clean up your reputation. It deters great candidates and is usually the sign of a deeper malaise.
In my work with senior executives looking for another role, we generally come up with a hit list of key targets that fit their identified needs. Even though it’s a city of more than a million people, there aren’t a lot of Head Offices here, so we Adelaideans are generally more accommodating than many.
Yet, over the last 18 months, whenever I mentioned a particular large organisation as a prospect, 100% of my clients responded in the strongest terms that they would never dream of working for them. They would then proceed to tell me some extreme stories about the organisation that surely must have been exaggerated, so far-fetched did they sound.
I often work with employees in the Local Government sector. There is one Council with the reputation of being both extremely inefficient AND of bullying its employees. You can imagine how wide-spread that reputation is in the relatively small world of local government.
We all love a gossip
The world is a small place these days. Even if you operate in a very large city, you’ll find many members of a profession know each other. Chartered Accountants, for example, often spent years training with each other and keep meeting each other at Professional Development activities. And they talk to each other…
What that means for an organisation with a bad reputation is they restrict their access to talented, skilled employees. Before long, if they don’t watch it, they have started a downward spiral of diminishing performance. They attract ever more poorly skilled and poorly principled employees, as they are shunned by the good and the great.
There’s an often quoted rule of thumb that an unhappy customer will tell 8 – 20 people about a negative experience. If we replace ‘customer’ with ‘employee’ we get some very bad numbers indeed.
How can you find out what reputation your organisation has? And what can you do?
I’d start with an internal employee culture survey. I’d bet that if your leadership team is not highly regarded by its own staff members, the word would have spread to the external market.
Then, if the results are not good, I would engage a reputable firm of consultants who can help your leadership team to take a good hard look at themselves and help you and your staff to move along the path to good governance, behaviour and performance.
Start from the top, with the Board and the executive Team and work your way down. Organisations morph and change all the time, and they make hard decisions. It’s never too late to do some navel gazing and embark upon some hard decisions that improve the fundamentals of your organisation.
Hack #3: ‘Let’s discuss apprehensions before they turn into problems.’ Haresh Sippy
Clean up your approach to underperforming or unhappy staff. It affects your culture and ability to retain great employees.
We all know that engaged employees lead to increased productivity, retention, customer loyalty and profitability. What can you do to help the right employee to re-connect and the wrong employee to get off the bus?
Sometimes it takes an outsider to help your staff decide whether it’s stay or go time. I sometimes get a phone call from a worried People & Culture Manager asking me to help deliver our Career Compass program.
It’s my favourite work and over the years, I can remember some outstanding moments.
Example 1: The wrong people off the bus… Peter just didn’t want to work closely with people on a day-to-day basis.
Peter had been an external consultant to a government department. He was so good they brought him in as an employee. It turned out badly and neither party was happy! Peter completed our analysis and realised that there was zero connection between what was important to him in a career and a workplace, and his current situation. He resigned the very next day.
Example 2: The right people in the right seats
Another Executive I worked with, Catrina, had lost her mojo. Her boss was talking about significant changes in her role, and she took it as a criticism and was struggling with motivation. At the end of our program, Catrina realised that she did want to stay at the firm and decided to take a more active role in her career. She designed some changes to her job to present to her boss, she did a Gap Analysis to identify future development opportunities and she was as keen as mustard to get started.
Consider the words of Good to Great author, Jim Collins: ‘Companies that make the change from good to great…don’t ‘motivate’ people—their people are self-motivated.’
Focus on keeping the right people on the bus and allow the wrong people to understand that they may need to get off the bus, with dignity.
Health & Hygiene
These issues appear time and time again in business literature.
- Reputation: Your reputation as an employer can influence how candidates perceive your company, and whether they choose to apply, accept, or decline your offers. According to a 2023 study by LinkedIn, 75% of job seekers research a company’s reputation before applying, and 86% would not work for a company with a bad reputation.
- Recruitment Portals: Yet another LinkedIn analysis highlighted how poor recruitment practices resulted in damaged reputation and increased turnover.
- Disengaged Employees: A Harvard Business Review found that businesses with highly engaged employees enjoyed 100% more job applications. Further, failure to deal with disengaged employees not only drives employees to leave their jobs but also negatively impact motivation and productivity.
There is no one right path to sustained success, but the fact is, healthier organisations do tend to perform better than unhealthy ones. These are critical issues to tackle and to get right.
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