Every company seeks top talent to help grow its business and succeed, but not every company knows how to find it.
Too often, businesses settle for job candidates who meet some of the criteria for a position because they tire of interviewing, or simply don’t know where to find more qualified candidates. But a specialized recruiting firm can help you find those candidates after you have carefully evaluated your needs for a position, says Danny Spitz, president of EverStaff.
“Companies often go into the recruitment process with high expectations when hiring new individuals, and working with a specialized recruiting firm can help you meet and fulfill those expectations instead of falling short,” says Spitz.
Smart Business spoke with Spitz about how to evaluate your company’s staffing needs and how a specialized recruiting firm can help find individuals to meet your expectations.
How can a company begin to identify its staffing needs?
Start by evaluating your current staff to identify strengths and weaknesses within each department or within individual positions. Develop a current job description and evaluate it to make sure that is what is actually being done on a day-to-day basis. Update those descriptions annually, because in this economy, companies must be flexible and job responsibilities change to meet requirements. This process will allow you to make sure you are maximizing the position for your company’s requirements.
Once you’ve done evaluations, a specialized recruiting firm can do a full analysis of the department, or the individual positions, to understand how the recruitment process can enhance performance by identifying the right talent.
Should a company evaluate only open positions?
No. Meeting a company’s high expectations doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a current job opening. The best time to start looking for talent and raise expectations is actually when you have someone currently in the position but know you could hire someone with better talent that will enhance the company’s performance.
A lot of times, companies have someone they like, who is a good worker, but that person is not able to keep up with the growth of the company or take on additional responsibilities because he or she has hit the ceiling. Every year, a company should analyze every position and every function within that responsibility to make sure that the person is meeting or exceeding standards. And if he or she is not meeting or exceeding standards, that’s an opportunity to evaluate whether there is someone in the market that you can bring in to enhance that position.
This applies to upper management, as well. It is critical that you have the right managers in place, because if your management team is not exceeding expectations, it’s very likely that their teams are not meeting expectations, either.
Companies should continually try to upgrade positions if they believe there is better talent out there. Sometimes that means moving the person currently in that position to one more suited to his or her skill set, and sometimes it means letting that person go. Those are critical decisions that every company is faced with to make sure it has the right people to take it to the next level. Every company should be looking for those people who are constantly going to add value and help you get to the next level.
What would you say to a business leader who is reluctant to let someone go or move someone to another position?
It’s tough to recognize that the company has outgrown the skill set of someone you like. It’s difficult because you’re not evaluating someone on a personal level as much as if his or her talents are a good fit for the company. If the company is hesitating to make that transition, it is suffering as a result.
The management team needs to look at where the company needs to be in the next year, or next five years, and come up with a plan that will ensure it has the right staff in place to allow it to continue to hit those levels of success.
How can a specialized recruiting firm help identify the right people for a company’s needs?
While a company should do the evaluation process on its own, when looking to make improvements, partnering with a specialized recruiting firm is critical.
The recruiting firm will analyze a company’s expectations and determine if they are reasonable and, if so, how it can meet those expectations. The recruiting team will do customized searches based on where it thinks the company’s weaknesses are, where the position stands in terms of weaknesses and where improvement needs to be, and focus on identifying individuals who have the strengths to offset the weaknesses the company is facing.
It’s a very in-depth process, as the specialized recruiting firm not only takes individuals through the interview process but tests their skills, evaluates computer and personal skills, identifies where their strengths are and matches those to the company’s weaknesses. That’s what needs to happen to meet the company’s high expectations, because it’s looking for improvement out of that position.
The specialized recruiting firm will then narrow the pool of candidates based on the specific criteria developed between it and the company. It’s a very time-consuming process, but taking the time to recruit and attract the best talent will allow a company to save money by having the right individual in place or make more money by having better talent.
Danny Spitz is president of EverStaff. Reach him at (216) 674-0788 or [email protected].
