Back to Blogs
  • Publish Date: Posted about 11 years ago
Shutterstock 708283213

Those of you who read my post last week will know that I presented at the recent Recruitment International conference on the importance of attraction and retention,  and I shared my top tips for retaining employees on the blog.  This week I’m offering my tips on attraction:

  • Where to look:

It’s no secret that those recruitment companies (SThree and Spencer Ogden are great examples) that have expanded rapidly did so through graduate schemes. And that is exactly what we have done at Consol with great success. Define who you are looking for before you embark on your search. That’s not to say that we don’t hire high billers, of course we do but our success has been built on entry level hiring.

  • Attributes:

Once you have established who you are trying to attract you need to define what attributes you are looking for. At Consol, for example, any potential employee must have drive, energy and intelligence. It took us some time to establish this and we did so by looking at our top performers and establishing – via psychometric testing amongst other ways – what attributes they all shared.

  • The interview:

Too many organisations fail to secure the talent they want due to their interview process. Ensure the interviewer not only knows what attributes you are looking for, but will also sell the business as you would. Here at Consol, for example, I conduct many of the first interviews for this very reason.  Good talent in the recruitment sector is scarce – interviews are just as much a platform for you to sell yourself to the candidate as they are selling to you. You’ve got to get it right first time.

  • The offer:

Once you’ve found the right candidate it goes without saying that you want to get them on board as soon as possible. However people want to feel a sense of worth and an immediate offer can be misread as you simply wanting a ’bum on the seat’.

  • Marketing/PR/Awards:

If you have won industry awards – particularly if they are focussed on being an employer of choice’  – or have embarked on any PR and marketing activities these should not only be visible on your company’s communications channels, but also mentioned when interviewing. People not only want to work with employers which have been recognised for their achievements, but that also know their industry inside out.