Imagine this.

You, as a business owner, have a job opening. It’s a critical position, so you want to hire a skilled, experienced professional. You understand the value of the role, and to attract the correct candidates, you offer a competitive salary and benefits. And lo and behold, a person who seems to be a perfect match for the role soon appears. Of course, you hire her/him, provide training, learning tools– in short, you invest a lot of the company’s time and money in the new hire.

And you get no results at all. Suddenly you realise the perfect match turned out to be a complete mismatch.

OK, fine, it happens. You let the person go, swallow your disappointment and start the whole process again. And again. And again!

Sounds familiar?

I know – The Struggle is Real.

And trust me when I say you are not alone in it.

In fact, 9 out of 10 employers struggle to fill positions due to skills gaps, and skill gaps are among the top challenges employers face when hiring (The Future of Work 2022 Global Report, Monster).

That includes my recent customer.

They have struggled to attract the right person for a critical role for quite some time. They did hire a couple of people, but soon the new hires turned out not to be suitable. Why? Because of the skills and ability gaps.

Playing a guessing game was no longer an option, so they turned to UnscriptedHR.

The Health Check

The first thing for me was to understand the current hiring process the customer had in place. I asked various questions to learn how the previous candidates were hired, the method, and how the whole process looked.

The Recommendations

Next, I reviewed and revised the job description. I recommended going back to what the vision and goals were for the business. With that in mind, together with the customer, we established what activities were critical for the role. We developed a ‘why work with us’ method to get a clear picture of the role, what success looks like, and the organisational culture and values. These were the key aspects for the person to align with.

Job Advertisement

The next step was to review and revise the job advertisement. We decided to target and advertise the role through methods aligned with the industry and job-level experience of the position. We placed paid advertising and conducted a search through targeting skills, industry, market and location.

The Selection Process

We have also redesigned the selection process to include a psychometric survey and case study. We reviewed the questions asked at each stage of the interview process to align with the key competencies for the role. We also conducted a final panel interview with the business owner, HR and technical expert on the team.

Transparency

Finally, we ensured that openness and transparency were upfront about the manager’s style of operating, the team culture and the expectations/goals of the job.

(BTW, can you believe that a staggering 60% of businesses don’t set any goals or milestones for new hires?! Urban Bound).

The Result

Introducing these additional steps allowed us to identify the strengths and experience candidates could bring to be successful in the role.

The result – a successful hire who has now been with the business for 4 years.

UnscriptedHR makes things happen.

We make HR simple so people know they are doing the right thing by their people and for their bottom line.