The right people on the bus

Recruitment, Integration, Retention in the 21st century
By Michalis A. Michael

Getting the Right People on the Bus

This is a parallel borrowed from Jim Collins’s book “Good to Great” that has nothing to do with a bus drive and everything to do with a roller coaster ride! Getting the right people on the bus is a good start but that’s all it is. To keep them for the duration of the ride and to keep them fulfilled in all aspects is a challenge by far more demanding than selecting and attracting them.

1. Recruitment

The conventional way of recruiting people is to first identify the vacancy, create a job description if one is not available already and then consider channels of communicating the vacancy to the right target group. You can guess that there is an unconventional way which is on a good way to become conventional by being more and more accepted as a best practice in HR management. It is to always be in a recruiting mode for whichever available position. This is even applicable for new positions that can be created as a result of “discovering” a specific type of a person during a continuous quest to find the right people. One example to bring this point home would be: while having dinner at a restaurant one might identify a waiter who can be a potential employee by something extraordinary they did! Being on constant alertness (here we mean any member of the management team including the HR Director of course) at all times is the mandate here. Every person you meet is a prospective member of your team.

1.1. The conventional way done differently

The aim here should be to maintain a constant flow of candidates through the interviewing machine. There is a number of ways to source candidates such as:
- printed press advertisement of vacancies
- posting on own web-site as well as on specialist job search web-sites
- notice boards at universities and other public places relevant to the target
- executive search firms (database search & head hunting)
- inform own employees and ask for recommendations

Keeping the pipeline (figure 1.) full from bottom to top is a really challenging task and once mastered a business practice that can make a huge difference in terms of company performance. The first part of the pipeline is of-course all about recruitment but the rest has to do with succession plans and the ability to retain employees for longer periods (if not until retirement age).

Continuous interviewing can have a multiple effect in tangible and intangible ways such as:
- whenever an employees retires, decides to leave or is fired there is always people waiting to enter the company at entry level. It is irrespective what position the leaving employee occupied because there will always be people waiting to fill in the position from one position below. Depending on the seniority of the person leaving a domino effect will be created (in a positive way) until all empty positions created by the shifts-up are filled.
- It passes the message to all existing employees (especially at entry positions) that there are many people out there who are hungry for their positions in the company
- An in-built element to continuous interviewing is the “thank you but not at this time letter”, because it would be impossible to hire all the good people we meet if we really see people every single week of the year. When someone receives a letter like this from a company one possible reaction is to feel “ I was not good enough this time” I will try harder in the future. In other words working for this company becomes an aspiration!
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1.2. The unconventional way

This is to go by the rule: First decide Who to employee and then What they should be doing!


2. Integration

Cult-like Environment

This might sound like a heresy group, but what it really is , is an environment that promotes as many links between employees themselves and between each one of them and the company. These links should not only be limited within the business framework but ideally should transfer into the social life of the employees.

Closely related to this is “the only entry position vacancy policy” of some companies. One good example here is P&G. A P&Ger is a “unique species”. It is not something everybody can enjoy (the P&G way) but those who do are very proud to be P&Gers and it surely feels like a cult to belong to P&G.

First question you ask yourself is would I feel comfortable to confide a secret to this person?
Second question: If I started my own business would I want this person to be part of my team?