Recruit for growth
The typical recruitment efforts in a company go something like this:
A manager has an opening, so between all of his day-to-day responsibilities, he runs ads and conducts interviews. It’s a priority, but it’s not
his No. 1 focus — which is what Jackson sees as the main problem
and is one way he has sought to differentiate his company from others.
“If anything is important in a business, have somebody’s livelihood
depending on it,” Jackson says. “It amazes me how much companies
will give lip service to this, but they don’t have people actually in
charge of doing this. You have to have dedicated people on your
staff that earn 100 percent of their income by finding good people.”
Many companies wait until they reach whatever magical number
they think qualifies them as a large company to add a full-time
recruiter. In contrast, from day one, Jackson Healthcare has had a
full-time recruiter to ensure the company doesn’t just fill spots but
that they get the best — and that they do this before they’re needed,
which is the next key to hiring.
“If you want to grow 20 percent next year, you have to focus on hiring 30 percent more people,” Jackson says. “You’re going to have
some fall off, you’ll have some turnover, and you want to be setting
up. Our focus in 2007 was not only to grow X percent in whatever
division, but it was to set up for ’08.
“If you say I need 12 people to grow the exact amount, what happens if people don’t hire on time? Or they hire too few? And if you
hire them all in December, it didn’t help you that year. … If it takes
three to six months for somebody to be productive, then you have
to hire ahead of it.”
Once you hire the amount of people you’ll need for the following
year’s growth goals, train them and get them comfortable in the work
environment as quickly as possible.
“There’s three levels of every person that goes through
employment,” Jackson says. “The first phase is you cost more
than you’re producing. The next phase is you’re costing about
as much as you’re producing, and the third phase is you’re
making money for the company, more than it’s costing.”
He says that you have to have people in this third phase longer
than they were in the first phase just to break even.
“The faster you get the person off the street to be profitable by setting them up in a process, operation or situation to be productive,
that’s where the action is,” Jackson says. “That’s where the rubber
meets the road that every individual is productive as fast as possible.
That’s scalable — it is easier to grow, easier to recruit and a better
foundation for growing a company.”