Employees are a business's biggest resource and biggest expense, why is their recruitment treated so casually?

The bad advert

Yesterday I saw a job advert posted by a global digital marketing company. They need to recruit a Marketing Manager to lead a small team, it's a maternity cover role so it's going to be very important that the new employee hits the ground running. Unfortunately, the company hadn't used their marketing expertise to write the job advert,

Under education, the advert asked for "a relevant degree or equivalent experience". That suggests that this is a graduate position but they'll accept someone with similar experience to a graduate. As this is a temporary line management position in marketing surely the key requirement is for someone with relevant experience to the job so why is the "degree or equivalent" included in the job advert? It's either because they have a template that includes this in every job advert or, more probably, someone has just reused an advert for a graduate role and not changed the education section.

The job advert was formatted into two columns on their website, in a way that made it difficult to read, mainly due to a list of 10 desired skills which included:

• "Strong PC/IT skills including MS Office"– what experienced Marketing Manager doesn't know how to use Word or Outlook?
• "Awareness of emerging trends and new opportunities" – which is obviously not an actual skill.

Out of 10 desired skills (there weren't any essential skills by the way), only two were actually skills, and the other eight were either experience or personal attributes which were overused cliches probably copied from old adverts or the internet.

The whole advert reads as if a junior member of staff was told: "We need an advert for a Marketing Manager to cover XXXX while they are on maternity leave put something together and post it on the website and LinkedIn."

It certainly doesn't read as if they've thought about their target market and how to attract them.

There wasn't even a salary, just "Dependant on experience" which puts off 80 per cent of applicants as they want to know they are applying for a job in their salary bracket and the fact that you don't know what salary to offer means that you don't really know what you are looking for.

Plan well, recruit well

Now, I've used this advert as an example but it is not unusual to see adverts like this and the cause is a lack of care about the recruitment process. I have been sent numerous job descriptions with comments such as: "We used this to recruit for this position three years ago" and "I wasn't sure what to put, I think this is about right".

I've even been asked to write the job description for clients because they were too busy to write one themselves and I probably know what the Project Manager, Software Developer and Marketing Manager job descriptions should say.

If you are launching a new product or service, you will conduct market research and identify customer needs, price points, pain points, etc. If you are looking to buy a new product or service you will decide what you need to buy, what it will do for your business, how you will use it, what your budget is, what are essential requirements that are the nice to haves and what are the definite no-nos. This is what you need to do when you are recruiting but you don't.

Recruitment is treated casually because, all too often, recruitment is seen as a painful, expensive and time-consuming process and so pushed to the side, left to chance and ultimately it fails and proves your preconceptions right.

If you put the same effort into your recruitment as you do with your product development and marketing, if you take as much care identifying your needs when it comes to hiring a new employee as you do when choosing a new phone provider, your recruitment will become painless, cheaper and quicker.

Your salary bill is probably the biggest bill in your company but without your employees, you can't deliver to your customers, without customers you don't have an income. With anything else this critical in business, companies will have long-term plans, contingency planning, maintenance plans and budgets etc. but staffing is left to chance without contingency planning in case of resignations, retention planning, future hiring strategies in place etc.

The reason that many companies struggle to recruit is that they haven't planned well, they recruit in emergencies instead of when they have time to choose, they don't know what they are looking for and where to find them and they don't have a budget in place.

Plan your recruitment as well as plan every other aspect of your business and your recruitment will be a success, you will hire the best candidates, you will retain staff, your employees will be more productive and your business will be more successful.

By Steve Balfour-Ackroyd thejobguru

Steve Ackroyd is the founder of The Job Guru (also known as TJG), a company that helps other businesses to find and hire new employees through the Application Booster service. Steve has over 2 decades experience of working with small businesses, helping them to grow through providing expert knowledge, consultancy and services both online and in person.

Steve has been helping companies recruit for the last decade and has built up a considerable following over that time by providing honest, straightforward advice to help business owners understand how to find and retain the best employees for their businesses.

You can find more about Steve on his website www.thejobguru.co.uk or his LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejobguru/.