Modeled after Pinterest, Weddles.com offers four channels of information and resources found nowhere else on the Web. And, one of those channels is specifically tailored for those Employers and Recruiters who are determined to find the best talent for their openings!
What’s in the Employers & Recruiters channel at Weddles.com? There are:
- Books & Tools for recruiting & sourcing excellence
- An archive of Next Practice Recruiting Tips
- An Association Directory organized by career field & industry
- Insights on Career Activists – the passive prospects who are so hard to recruit
- And much, much more!
So, make Weddles.com the place where you start your business day! And, encourage your colleagues to join you there, as well.
Next Practices: Selling the Supervisor
The old axiom is as true today as it was fifty years ago: Workers join companies and leave supervisors. The number one source of attrition, especially within the first year or two of hiring, is not the nature of the job or the culture of the organization, but the personality and work methods of the hiring manager. That’s why one of the Next Practices in recruitment advertising is best described as “selling the supervisor.”
Among the biggest trends in recruitment these days is assessing the personality and outlook of candidates. A recent Time cover story, for example, highlighted the large and growing battery of tests now being used to profile applicants and then compare them to an employer’s current high performing workers. According to conventional wisdom, those who most closely match the all stars are also most likely to be all stars themselves.
But here’s the rub with that view: it assumes that all workers operate in a compatible state. In other words, if a worker with x traits does well in a job, then another worker with similar traits will do equally as well … regardless of how well they like and get along with their supervisor. Maybe that’s true in The Truman Show’s idealized world, but in an imperfect workplace, it’s naive.
Supervisors have a huge impact on the engagement, satisfaction, performance and ultimately the retention of those they supervise. They are as much a key “requirement” of a job as the need for a college degree or 15 years of experience. And, for that reason, a profile of the supervisor should be included in the specifications for an opening.
Communicating a Supervisor’s Specs
Selling the supervisor is not an invasion of their privacy. It doesn’t require that they reveal any deep, dark personal secrets or even what they have posted on social media. Instead, the goal is to identify and make visible their preferences and expectations regarding employees’ work habits, methods and outcomes. In effect, it removes the mystery from who will thrive under their style of management.
Of course, describing a “supervisor’s specs” takes self-knowledge and more than a little honesty, so at first, it may generate some resistance. As the Time article points out, however, the same tests that are now being used in recruitment are also increasingly used to optimize internal performance. Hence, that data may already be available to the supervisor. And when it’s not, it’s easily obtained from commercially available assessments or by simply asking a unit’s high performers which of their supervisor’s traits they find most important and supportive in doing their best work.
Those attributes are then summarized in a paragraph of the job posting that is set off with a separate heading such as Working With the Boss or Meet the Person Who Would Be Your Supervisor. The paragraph does not identify the supervisor by name, but instead provides a detailed description of the individual characteristics they find most compatible with their values and thus most effective in their work unit. It might, for example, lead off with a statement such as this: With over 15 years in their current position, the supervisor for this opening works best with individuals who can handle multiple tasks at the same time and keep the priority of each straight without a lot of day-to-day oversight. They expect the person to ask questions when they are missing information, but otherwise to work independently.
While it won’t eliminate graffiti applicants who will apply for just about any job opening they see, selling the supervisor will help the best job seekers make smart decisions. It enables them to gauge their fit, not with a job but with an employment opportunity – the job and their prospective supervisor – and that more complete assessment provides the highest probability of hiring and retaining a high performing worker.
Thanks for reading,
Peter
Visit me at Weddles.com
Next Practices – The Book
Best Practices are so yesterday! They are sourcing and recruiting techniques designed for a time that has passed.
Next Practices are strategies and tactics for winning the real War for the Best Talent – the one you actually face today and will face tomorrow. They modernize your approach to:
- Recruitment Advertising
- Social Recruiting
- Candidate Engagement
- Optimizing the Candidate Experience
- Managing Your Own Recruiting Career
so you maximize your success.
The book is composed of short, straight-to-the-point essays that can be read in ten or fifteen minutes and still transport you to a whole new dimension in the state-of-the art for recruiting and sourcing talent. With titles like Become a Talent Whisperer, Post-Social Recruiting, The Inconvenient Truth of Recruiting and Don’t Post a Job, Advertise Respect, they are sure to entertain and enlighten you.
So, don’t recruit with yesterday’s techniques. Get Next Practices and start recruiting right now with the next generation of recruiting mastery.
The book is available on Amazon. Click here to place your order.
What’s Happening In the Job Market?
Despite all the happy talk about the growth in job openings, it’s still incredibly hard to find a GOOD job and one that pays anywhere near what it costs to live in this country. That’s as true for recruiters as it is for everyone else in the workforce.
So, what’s going on?
There are plenty of talking heads opining on cable and more than enough blog posts and magazines offering their take on the situation. But, wouldn’t it be nice to look into this situation and its causes without having to endure a lot of self-appointed punditry?
Well, now you can. Read Peter Weddle’s novel about the 21st Century world of work in America called A Multitude of Hope. It uses the fictional tale of three job seekers to explore what’s happening to individual working men and women in a workplace and job market churning with change.
To read a FREE excerpt of A Multitude of Hope, click here.
The Recruiting Resources You Deserve
The best recruiters use the best resources to get the job done. And, when it comes to reaching top talent online, their choice is clear. It’s WEDDLE’s Books. Get yours today!
WEDDLE’s Guide to Employment Sites on the Internet. This is the 11th edition of the Guide the American Staffing Association called the “Zagat” of job boards and social media sites.
The Talent Sourcing & Recruitment Handbook. This is Shally Steckerl’s tell-all guide to his sourcing secrets and cybersleuthing for hard-to-find talent.
WEDDLE’s Guide to Association Web Sites. This book details the recruiting resources and capabilities that are available at the Web-sites of over 3,000 professional and technical associations.
Finding Needles in a Haystack. This one-of-a-kind guide lists over 25,000 keywords and keyword phrases, across 5,400 job and position titles in 28 industries and professions.