What if you had to re-recruit your best people?
I was talking to a People and Culture leader last year who admitted that they were struggling to recruit ‘a star’. Of course, stars (who usually make up only about 5% of the workforce) are extremely difficult to find, especially if you’re overwhelmed with applicants, as this organisation was.
My advice was to think a little differently. Rather than listing the responsibilities of the role and asking for people to demonstrate when they had fulfilled them, I got them to undertake an exercise to list the attributes of their best staff, starting with their emotional skills.
When I sat down with the leader to list the top seven attributes of their best staff, they were as follows:
Approachable
Empathetic
Collaborative
Honest
Disciplined
Kind; and
Courageous
Of course, that’s not to say that anyone with these attributes can immediately fulfil the role they were looking to fill, some technical skills are always important for this. However, it was these specific attributes that they were looking for, only one of which (Kind) had previously featured on their role description.
I followed up with them earlier this year to find out how they’d got on. Whilst, as before, they’d been overwhelmed with applicants, they’d managed to find two people who were able to actively demonstrate these attributes. Neither of them had held a similar role before, but were already shaping up to be hugely successful additions to the team.
The World Economic Forum Future of Jobs report indicates that emotional intelligence is one of the top 10 skills to recruit for, yet in the rush to bring people onboard it is frequently overlooked. This despite the fact that 71% of employers say that they value emotional intelligence more than technical skills when evaluating candidates!
So, if you’re struggling to find the ‘right’ people for your team, it might be worth asking yourself, ‘If I had to re-recruit my best people, what attributes would I look for?’ and recruit for those instead.
