Chapter 12

You're Hired! Hiring for Engagement

In This Chapter

Identifying key behaviors and traits

Exploring the BEST approach

Recognizing the importance of diversity

Deciding whether to hire or promote internally

Leveraging social media when hiring

Selling prospective employees on your company

Suppose you're a basketball coach, and your team, well, your team just sucks. Sure, they have ball-handling skills, and they can shoot. But as a unit, they just don't gel. They're not cohesive. They're selfish. They communicate poorly, if at all. It's almost as if they don't care whether they win or lose!

Obviously, the team suffers from a lack of engagement. But you may not be dealing with an engagement issue, per se. That is, your problem may not be that you haven't developed a system by which to engage your players. Instead, it may be that you just picked the wrong people to be on your team. In other words, you have a selection issue. If you select the right players for your team, engagement will naturally occur.

Often, when faced with selecting employees (read: hiring), employers focus on candidates’ education and skills. After all, those are easy to quantify. But really, it's a candidate's traits and behaviors that will be key to her success in an organization. That's not to say that education and skills aren't important — after all, you probably can't win a basketball game if you can't dribble and shoot — but they're only part of the equation. In this chapter, you find out how to pinpoint success characteristics — those traits and behaviors that yield superior performance and engagement — and to hire people who display them.

Be proactive and not reactive in your hiring practices. Successful organizations are always interviewing potential candidates, even if there are no current openings. Don't wait for someone to quit to begin the recruitment process.

Trait Up: Pinpointing Key Behaviors and Traits

Back in the dark ages (1985), while working for an engineering firm, I was sent to recruit at MIT. Not surprisingly, in terms of education and skills, all 15 of the candidates I met were off the charts. It was MIT, after all! How on earth was I supposed to determine which ones to invite back to our office for meetings with senior executives? Fortunately, a great mentor of mine, Ed Burns, told me, “Pick the one person you would love to have over to your house for a cold beer.” Yes, we had to hire people who were technically brilliant, but we also needed people who would interface well with our clients. Of the 15 brilliant individuals I interviewed, all had the necessary education and skills to perform as an entry-level staff engineer. But Ed's filter enabled me to narrow things down. In the end, it came down to the behaviors and traits necessary for the job we needed done.

Since then, I've often been amazed at the misguided focus of hiring managers, who place too much emphasis on education and skills and not nearly enough on behaviors and traits. The fact is, the most engaged employees are engaged because of behaviors and traits they exhibit, not because of their skill set or the educational degrees they hold. Indeed, if my nearly 30 years in HR taught me anything, it's that employees are promoted for displaying specific behaviors and traits — namely, those that define high performance and high engagement.

Sure, education and skills are important. Having the necessary education and skills is similar to having Jacks or better — you need them just to stay in the poker game! But often, it's the intangibles, like behaviors and traits, that get people promoted in the workplace. In fact, if you were to ask a leadership team to define the common attributes of the top 10 percent of their workforce, or to define their most engaged employees, they would most likely outline a common set of behaviors and traits — rather than education or skills — that all these individuals possess.

To determine what behaviors and traits are most important for your organization, gather a cross-sectional group of leaders and list the employees who consistently embody excellence at your company. (The actual number of names will depend on the company's size; target the top 10 percent.) It doesn't matter how junior or senior the employees are, or whether they're from research and development (R&D), retail, finance, or HR. Then start listing the behaviors and traits that make these individuals shine, making sure to limit your list to personal qualities rather than achievements.

For example, let's say an employee on your list, John, an architect, always comes up with the best numbers. Why? Is it because he's a great architect, which you could attribute to education and skills? No. It's because he's tenacious, creative, and resourceful. These are traits. In addition, John surrounds himself with the best people, chases clients the company never would have pursued otherwise, modifies his business development plan to incorporate new findings based on proposal wins and losses and subsequent contact with clients, and is dogged in following up and following through. These are behaviors.

If the people on your list all possess the same 15 behaviors or traits, you can assume these are the distinguishing characteristics you should be looking for in new hires and candidates for promotion. Of course, education and skills are important. But those are what's needed merely to get a candidate's foot in the door or to suggest adequate performance. You don't want adequate — you want excellent.

Here are several behaviors and traits commonly associated with high performance and high engagement (your requirements may differ):

• Is enthusiastic
• Is solution oriented
• Is team oriented
• Is selfless
• Is optimistic
• Shows a passion for learning
• Asks “Why not?” instead of simply saying, “That won't work”
• Passes along credit but accepts blame
• Goes above and beyond

Behaviors and traits also have an effect on the opposite end of the employment spectrum: getting fired or laid off. Often, the first employees to be let go exhibit certain behaviors and traits — in this case, those that define low performance and low engagement. If you were to ask a group of HR executives if they've ever fired an accountant because she couldn't add or fired a designer because he couldn't design, their answers would likely be a resounding no. But if you were to ask that same audience if they had ever fired an accountant or designer because of a certain behavior or trait, the heads would nod in a definitive yes.

Following are several behaviors and traits commonly associated with low performance and low engagement. Naturally, these are behaviors and traits you want to avoid:

• Is negative
• Is pessimistic
• Has a history of absenteeism
• Shows a “me first” attitude
• Is egocentric
• Accepts credit but passes along blame
• Focuses on monetary worth (“I'm not being paid to do that”)

Based on my experience, people who model the aforementioned high-performing traits will accelerate their careers, while those who model the low-performing behaviors and traits . . . well, they won't.

The good news is, just as employees can add to their education and improve their skills, they can, with effort, modify their behaviors — when they know which behaviors your organization considers valuable. You can help them along by recognizing and rewarding the behaviors you want to promote (and punishing the ones you want to discourage). Note, however, that traits are a little more difficult to modify. For example, say you work in hospitality, and your organization values extroverted personality types. Odds are, any introverts in your midst will have a hard time becoming extroverts. In that case, the correct response may be to counsel introverted employees to shift their careers toward a less extroverted career path within the business — say, switching from the front desk to the finance department.

List the traits that you'd like to see in an employee. Then list the behavior you think demonstrates each trait.

Good, Better, Best: Using the BEST Approach for Job Selection and Advancement

Most static organizations — that is, organizations that are change-averse or that refuse to embrace new technologies, workforce trends, or market changes — evaluate the skills and education of candidates when determining whether they're suitable for hire or promotion. In these environments, job descriptions focus on what experience, education, and skills a candidate will need to have to be considered for a job.

In contrast, dynamic organizations — that is, organizations that are nimble and innovative, that embrace new technologies and approaches, and that are their market change leaders — couple this evaluation with defining behaviors and traits that correspond to success in a job and incorporate these behaviors and traits in their selection process. Job descriptions in these environments include requirements for experience, education, and skills, but also outline the traits and behaviors a candidate must exhibit in order to be considered. Emphasis is on the things a candidate does — her accomplishments.

I use the acronym BEST to describe the process that managers should use to weave behaviors, education, skills, and traits into their employee selection and hiring process. BEST stands for the following:

• Behavior: How a person acts or reacts to specific circumstances. Behavior is demonstrated through performance, actions, and conduct. It's seen by our clients, our co-workers, and ourselves. Examples of behavior include expressing oneself clearly, meeting project deadlines, and remaining calm under pressure. Behaviors are often dictated by traits.
• Education: The information and knowledge a person carries with him. In other words, education is what people know, usually indicated by diplomas and certificates, but also through conversations. Examples of education include a master's degree in science and certification as a database administrator. Education is one of the primary reasons people are hired, but it ultimately plays a relatively small role in their success or failure (assuming, of course, that their education is adequate for the position in question).
• Skills: What a person can do. In other words, skills pertain to a person's ability to function in a job and perform the duties assigned. A skill, which can be taught more easily than a behavior or a trait, becomes evident through activities or demonstrations. Examples of skills include technical writing, accurately interpreting lab results, and proficiency in Microsoft Excel.
• Traits: Characteristics that define someone's personal nature. These may include integrity, honesty, accountability, enthusiasm, optimism, and so on. Traits are demonstrated through actions and behaviors.

Often, people get hired because of their education and/or skills. Based on exit interviews, however, the vast majority of employees who leave an organization or fail in a job do so not because of their education or skills, but because of their traits and behaviors, or their attitude.

In the following sections, I walk you through writing a job description based on the BEST approach. Then I give you examples of BEST characteristics found in high-performing employees.

Assembling the BEST job description

Many organizations kick off the hiring/selection process by filling out the dreaded new-hire requisition form — a form that, in most organizations, was originally written by Adam or Eve. Generally, these forms are all about education and skills, with little focus on behaviors and traits. The focus of these static documents is a job description; they request information on experience, academics, industry, responsibilities, competencies, blah, blah, blah.

The trick to hiring the person with the right combination of behaviors, education, skills, and traits is knowing what behaviors, education, skills, and traits will yield superior performance for the job you seek to fill, and developing a job description that takes these into account. This will involve some thinking on your part.

No pressure, but doing a really good job on this task is very important. Your efforts here will direct all subsequent activities involved with hiring a high-performance candidate who is ready to be engaged.

First, define six to eight performance objectives for the position. Here are some examples of performance objectives (these will vary based on the position and your needs):

• Improve the organization of the department by creating and maintaining an accurate filing system for both hard-copy and electronic versions of material.
• Successfully manage at least four projects to conclusion, within 10 percent of budget and 10 percent of deadline.
• Lead the social media advertising campaign for the company's six divisions, working within the desired budget and timeline.
• Open eight new branch locations within the next six months.
• Hire two new field technicians within the next two months, and have them fully trained in all product lines within the first nine months of their hire date.
• Evaluate and create a plan to improve the intranet site for ease of use, aesthetics, and navigation.
• Build a succession plan for the firm's top 100 positions by the end of the calendar year.

With these performance objectives in hand, consider what behaviors, education, skills, and traits a candidate will need in order to meet your performance objectives. For example, if you've established a performance objective of leading the social media advertising campaign for the company's six divisions, working within the desired budget and timeline, the applicable behaviors, education, skills, and traits may include the following:

• Behaviors: Shows initiative, is a self-starter, collaborates, exhibits autonomy, exhibits self-discipline
• Education: Bachelor's degree in communication, master's degree in digital media preferred
• Skills: Outstanding written and oral communication skills, knowledge of current social media and search optimization trends, expertise in mobile technology applications
• Traits: Creative, tenacious, competitive, high achiever

This information will serve as the foundation for the position's job description.

Naturally, some behaviors, education, skills, and traits will be more important than others. For this reason, you may opt to weight them.

If you wind up with several behaviors, education credentials, skills, and traits in your list, consider dividing them into two categories: absolute and desirable. Behaviors, education credentials, skills, and traits in the “absolute” category must be present or the candidate is not eligible for the position. Desirable behaviors, educational credentials, skills, and traits are “nice to haves.” In other words, they would add value to a candidate. For example, you might say that an associate's degree is required (as a “must have,” it's in the “absolute” category), and a bachelor's degree is preferred (it's a “nice to have,” in the “desirable” category). You might even go so far as to weight behaviors, educational credentials, skills, and traits to aid in your decision making. For example, you might weight having a general bachelor's degree as a 5, a bachelor's degree in a subject directly related to the role as an 8, and a bachelor's degree in a related subject from a top-tier school in that discipline as a 10.

Not sure what behaviors, education credentials, skills, and traits will best serve a performance objective? Think about the employees you currently have who are excelling in a position like the one you seek to fill and pinpoint their BEST characteristics. For example, if you're looking to hire a sales/account executive, take an inventory of your current high-performing sales/account executives and determine what behaviors, education credentials, skills, and traits they possess. This will give you an idea of the BEST requirements for that position.

You'll also want to devise a series of questions designed to suss out whether a candidate has the requisite behaviors, education credentials, skills, and traits. (For more information, see Chapter 13.)

Figure 12-1 shows a worksheet I've designed to help you develop a job description that factors in the BEST model — what I call a “BEST profile.” Feel free to modify or copy it and use it in your own organization.

Looking at a sample BEST characteristics matrix

Table 12-1 shows an example of a BEST characteristics matrix, which contains characteristics of high-performing employees in the four pillars of the BEST profile (behaviors, education, skills, and traits). Shown are examples of characteristics found in high-performing employees. (Notice the emphasis on behaviors and traits over education and skills.) This matrix is meant to serve as a guide for you as you develop your organization's own BEST profile.

Your hiring process should be dynamic, focusing on one's role rather than on the job. Success characteristics are defined by the key behaviors and traits in your culture and by high performance.

The BEST profile is fluid. Modifications are made to fit the candidate instead of attempting to squeeze a person into a dated job description. The idea is to hire engaged employees who have the behaviors and traits it takes to be successful — even if their skills and education aren't quite perfect.

Mix and Match: The Importance of Diversity

Back in the day, fostering diversity in the workplace was mostly about complying with various laws that guarantee equal opportunity regardless of age, gender, race, physical ability, religious beliefs, and in some areas, sexual orientation. Now, however, smart companies grasp that diversity — or, as I prefer to think of it, inclusion — is both broader and more subtle. Inclusion allows for more comprehensive solutions to the problems facing your organization. Perhaps even more important, inclusion garners more comprehensive support for a solution . . . if the various constituencies within your organization feel they've been given a seat at the table. The end result? You guessed it: higher levels of engagement.

As you assess the level of diversity in your organization, ask yourself: Do the heads of your teams and divisions look like your company? Does your company look like your clients?

Diversity isn't just about age, gender, race, physical ability, religious beliefs, and sexual orientation, however. It's also about such things as communication style, thinking style, parental status, and education. Look at Figure 12-2. In this image, the inner ring represents the traditional areas of diversity and inclusion (age, gender, race, and so on) with which most businesses are already quite familiar. In contrast, the outer ring represents considerations that businesses often overlook. But often, these outer considerations are the unseen contributors to an individual's motivation and behavior on the job. Now, I'm not suggesting that the items in the inner ring are insignificant — I'm just saying that in order to create a successful, engaged, inclusive culture, these considerations need to be broadened to include those in the outer ring.

Diversity is the future of business. Companies that focus on inclusion will have a distinct advantage. Today as never before, you can leverage diversity of all kinds to make sure your future has the broadest foundation . . . and the highest potential.

Heads or Tails: Hiring from the Outside or Promoting from Within

When a position opens in an organization, the inevitable question — the one Hamlet himself would ask, if he worked in HR — is: Should you hire from outside or promote from within? The answer is simple: Before you ever look to hire externally, you must advertise openings internally and evaluate in-house talent for promotional and or lateral opportunities. If you don't, I promise you: Your existing employees will disengage.

Understanding your existing talent is the key to developing that talent effectively. To that end, you can categorize employees in one of four ways:

• Investment employees
• Performers
• Potentials
• Transition employees

Figure 12-3 shows the relationship between these four types of employees, providing managers with a clear picture of how to move employees from one type to the next.

Knowing how to categorize your employees can help you determine how best to engage and develop them.

Identifying investment employees

So-called investment employees are the 10 percent to 20 percent of employees who really matter. They define the standard for exceptional performance, functioning above and beyond the norm. They're your go-to people — the ones you trust the most and who display the highest level of competency. Your star performers, these employees solve problems, generate growth, are innovative and creative, and inspire others. They actively pursue goals, and inevitably give more than you ask of them. Their potential as employees has largely been reached.

Odds are, you, as a manager, spend the least amount of time with these employees because they're on autopilot. They simply don't need your input. Managers may also “reward” these employees by piling more and more work on them (after all, they're dependable) or, worse, may limit their career progression (“I don't want to nominate Mary for this position because I don't want to lose her”). But be warned: If these employees are not challenged, recognized, and rewarded, they pose your highest flight risk — which is bad, because they're the employees you can least afford to lose. As such, they're the ones in whom you want to invest — hence their name, investment employees.

To engage investment employees, you need to continue to offer challenges (and rewards), work to maintain their interest, and develop the employees further — for example, coaching them toward promotions. Oh, and don't ignore this group. Just because they don't need your attention doesn't mean they don't want it!

Spotting performers

Performers, which typically comprise between 30 percent and 35 percent of your employees, are a little like investment employees. They solve problems and manage themselves without requiring much in the way of your attention. They're your solid, steady workers. They do what's expected of them, without causing problems for the business or its clients. The difference? They haven't yet reached their full potential — although they may, with encouragement and support. In addition, some performers have limited upward mobility, sometimes by choice. Perhaps their potential to grow is limited by skills, or by something personal such as family obligations or an unwillingness to travel.

To engage performers, you must provide opportunities for growth while ensuring that they maintain high levels of performance. The trick is to encourage them to take on other duties and responsibilities, push them to stretch and grow, and provide opportunities for them to get involved with other areas either inside the company or externally. Or, if the employee's growth is self-limited, that person can continue to perform at a comfortable level, freeing the manager to focus staff-development resources on employees with the potential to move to the next level.

Recognizing potentials

Like performers, potentials, which comprise between 30 percent and 35 percent of your talent pool, are employees who haven't yet reached their full potential or performance capabilities. Why? Because they haven't had time to develop. Maybe they're junior employees, or perhaps they've only recently been promoted to a new level of responsibility. These employees exhibit the behaviors and traits of high performance, but because of a lack of tenure, maturity, skill, or knowledge, they aren't yet producing at optimum levels. Potentials represent your future, but they require additional skill development and tenure.

Engage this group of employees by cross-training and providing growth opportunities. Indeed, these are precisely the employees in whom you should invest substantial training dollars. The objective is to improve performance while maximizing potential. To that end, try setting and monitoring specific production goals, evaluating their workload (with an eye toward determining whether they're taking on too much), and checking whether more training is needed or wanted. In addition, make it a point to challenge these employees with new tasks and ask them to shoulder work when times are busy. Why? Because potentials will gain much-needed experience from these challenges, and because this strategy helps you to prevent burnout among your organization's top performers, causing them to disengage.

Identifying transition employees

Transition employees are the 10 percent to 20 percent of employees who aren't quite making the grade. They simply don't deliver the type of results or performance you expect, or they exhibit major deficiencies. Maybe the employee is a new hire and just isn't up to speed. Or maybe the employee is technically sound, but has been forced into a job that isn't a good match. It could be that the employee's supervisor has failed to set adequate goals and objectives. Or maybe the employee is simply satisfied doing the bare minimum. Regardless of the reason, transition employees require constant follow-up. This is okay for the short term, but for the long term? Not so much.

No employees should remain transition employees for the long term. Your goal is to move these employees into functioning roles or move them out of the position. To achieve this, evaluate their performance, offer candid and straightforward feedback, and set incremental goals. In addition, identify and discuss other potential positions in the company, or lateral moves. A transitional employee can move in any direction — including right out the door.

If you want to disengage your workforce, ignore your transition employees. You'll soon see erosion in the engagement levels of your investment, performer, and potential employee groups. Why? Because these higher-performing employees will know who your transition employees are — maybe even before you do. Allowing a disengaged, underperforming employee to remain employed, without taking any kind of corrective action, is sure to demoralize those employees who do pull their weight.

What Newspaper Ad? Leveraging Social Media

Back in the olden days — you know, 15 or 20 years ago — anyone seeking employment would look first to the local newspaper's Help Wanted section. These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find a job this way. What was once a major section of every daily newspaper, particularly on Sundays, is now a scant few pages (if any).

These days, the lion's share of job searches take place online, either on dedicated job-search sites such as Monster (www.monster.com) and CareerBuilder (www.careerbuilder.com) or, perhaps more commonly, on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and even YouTube.

If you're looking to find engaged employees, this is great news! Social media enables employers to post employment opportunities while at the same time positioning their overall brand. Some companies have even begun eschewing the former for the latter, focusing their hiring-related social media campaigns more on the company's brand and culture — what they do and who they are — than on highlighting individual jobs. Why? Because these employers understand that the key to hiring engaged employees is finding people who are a good fit for the firm's culture, more so than for a particular post.

Exploring LinkedIn

If you're looking for new hires, a great first stop is LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). With more than 200 million users in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, LinkedIn is far and away the largest professional networking site.

Many corporate recruiters, both internal and external, use LinkedIn to identify passive job candidates (people who aren't searching for a job per se, but who may be open to changing positions given the right set of circumstances). For their part, job seekers use LinkedIn to identify firms that may be hiring, and to keep their own profiles and résumés up to date in case an employer finds them. Indeed, for many on LinkedIn and other forms of social media, the focus has shifted from applicants finding new employers to employers discovering potential recruits!

Using Facebook for recruitment

The world's largest social networking site, Facebook (www.facebook.com) boasts more than 1 billion (that's billion, with a b) users. Although originally a social networking site for people to stay connected with family and friends, Facebook is increasingly becoming a tool for job seekers and employers alike.

What can you do to leverage Facebook as a recruiting tool? Here are a few ideas:

• Establish a company Facebook page and use it to post job openings.
• Encourage existing employees to share job postings on their personal Facebook pages, and reward those who bring in new talent — not just with recognition and thanks, but with an employee referral bonus. (For more on employee referrals, see the nearby sidebar, “Refer madness: Getting referrals from engaged employees.”)
• To increase the number of eyes on your job postings, use Facebook's promotional tools. For a fee, you can target those Facebook connections whose profiles match keywords you identify.
• Link your company's website to your company's Facebook page. Several apps are available that enable you to update your Facebook page automatically when new job postings are added to your company's site.

Ironically, many companies maintain a Facebook page but ban the use of Facebook in the workplace. If you want your company to leverage social media, you need to encourage its use as a “connector tool.” Employees need to feel comfortable using Facebook and other forms of social media as professional tools to make professional connections. Simply put, firms that disallow Facebook at the office are out of touch. You have to trust your employees to use social media properly in the workplace. Besides, if an employee spends three hours a day goofing around with his friends on Facebook, you have a performance issue, not a social media issue!

Connecting with potential recruits on Twitter

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is the world's fastest-growing social media site, with close to 600 million users and 11 accounts added every second. Not surprisingly, it has also become a popular site for employers looking to post job openings as well as to communicate other unique aspects of their companies, not to mention find prospective recruits.

Here are just a few reasons to use Twitter for hiring:

• Twitter enables you to directly connect with current and potential employees.
• If you follow the right people and organizations, Twitter is a great source of business information, 24 hours a day.
• With Twitter, you can broadcast important company or industry messages and share links to press releases, blogs, or news.
• Twitter enables you to post pictures and videos about your firm, exponentially increasing your ability to convey your EVP.
• With Twitter, you can confidentially connect with potential employees, and they with you (via direct messages).
• Twitter enables you to recruit globally . . . for free.
• Using Twitter, you can build relationships with passive job candidates.
• People with whom you establish relationships on Twitter will remember your brand, may help you share your message (through retweets), and may even recommend you to potential candidates.
• Loyal followers may go beyond Twitter, spreading information about your brand and your job openings outside the Twitterverse.
• Twitter will almost certainly continue to grow. The sooner you discover its advantages, the better able you'll be to use it as part of your portfolio of recruitment tools and branding efforts!

Using YouTube to find prospective employees

Looking to communicate about job openings and about your culture at the same time? Then YouTube (www.youtube.com), which boasts more than 1 billion unique users each month, may be the way to go. On YouTube, an employer can post videos describing what the organization is, preferably from the eyes of actual employees. Think about it: If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a three-minute video contains thousands of pictures . . . well, you do the math.

YouTube is unique in that it's a branding, communication, alignment, and entertainment tool, all wrapped in one. The days of CEOs sending out boring mass e-mails to communicate company messages are gone. (Well, CEOs may still do that, but the results won't be thrilling.) These days, enlightened CEOs send quick company updates via video to the masses via YouTube. This allows leaders to quickly and inexpensively broadcast their messages to a large population, both inside and outside the company. (This assumes the information in the video isn't confidential. If it is, the video should probably live on your company's internal server instead of on YouTube.)

YouTube is also a great way to communicate your EVP, which can boost your recruitment efforts. Videos are a great way to show your company culture to potential employees (while at the same time enabling you to convey your brand to potential customers). As an added bonus, YouTube videos often go viral because they can be easily shared by employees or others via e-mail or social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. This can increase your reach considerably.

You don't need to spend a fortune to produce YouTube videos. In fact, my company recently produced a YouTube video, “Who's Sinking Your Boat,” done by a wonderfully talented intern from a local college, which received thousands of views in its first few weeks. And if you're producing a video for internal use only, your employees might even prefer an “amateur”-style video over one that's professionally produced. Often, these videos are shot with nothing more than a smartphone by employees themselves. To engage your employees, seek volunteers to help with their production. You'll find that Millennials in particular will enjoy taking ownership of the creation of these videos. You can even make a contest out of it, with a prize for the employee who submits the best, most entertaining video.

Of course, if you're producing a YouTube video for external use, partnering with a professional can help you create a terrific promotional and recruitment tool. For an example of a terrific recruitment video for Twitter, visit http://youtu.be/vccZkELgEsU.

Making the Sale: Selling Yourself to Prospective Employees

In a typical hiring scenario, candidates attempt to “sell” themselves to a potential employer. But the truth is, it should be the other way around. Companies should view the hiring and selection process as a sales opportunity of sorts.

Think of the preparation that goes into the sales process: Companies spend thousands if not millions of dollars hiring experts to help crystallize their brands and messages. But people generally don't think of the hiring process in the same way. This needs to change. Because of the growing popularity of social media — in particular, of work-oriented sites like Glassdoor.com — companies must better sell their employee value proposition (EVP) to leverage their brand potential. In the future, firms will need to steal a page from their marketing departments to “sell” potential employees on why they should work for them. That's where having defined your EVP will really come in handy. Your most engaged candidates have choices; armed with your EVP, you can convince them to choose you.

I'd go so far as to suggest that your HR department create a “sales sheet” for candidates in order to communicate your EVP (see Figure 12-4). Make it pop! Your sales sheet should include the following:

• What you do: Describe what you do, share your company's history, and provide an overview of your company — for example, its sales, financials, and clients. Also, list any relevant rankings (for example, “We're the second largest engineering firm in the U.S., according to Engineering News Record”), highlight unique selling features of your product or service, and discuss your brand.
• Your purpose: State your values (that is, your guiding principles) and your core purpose, or reason for existing.
• Who you are: Talk about why you're unique. For example, maybe you've earned “Miami's Best Employer” awards for six years running. Maybe you were honored by Women's Magazine as “Top Employer of Minorities.” Or maybe you have expertise in 16 different technical and management disciplines. You can also discuss the size of your organization, your operating principles, your employee retention rate, and the results of your latest employee engagement survey.

Don't sell something you can't deliver. In other words, your sales sheet shouldn't make exaggerated claims about your firm. There's no better way to turn an exciting prospect into an embittered, resentful employee than to overpromise and underdeliver!