Top 10 Recruiting Tips (3)

Use Your Benefits to Your Advantage In Recruiting Employees

Keep your benefits above industry standard and add new benefits as you can afford them. You also need to educate employees about the cost and value of their benefits so they appreciate how well you are looking out for their needs.

Treasured currently by employees is flexibility and the opportunity to balance work with other life responsibilities, interests, and issues. You can't be an employer of choice without a good benefits package that includes standard benefits such as medical insurance, retirement, and dental insurance.

Employees are increasingly looking for cafeteria-style benefit plans in which they can balance their choices with those of a working spouse or partner. Pfau and Kay recommend stock and ownership opportunities for every level of employees in your organization. I like profit sharing plans and bonuses that pay the employee for measurable achievements and contributions.

Hire the Smartest Person You Can Find

In their recent book, First Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman recommend that great managers hire for talent. They believe that successful managers believe:

"People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough."

If you're looking for someone who will work well with people, you need to hire an individual who has the talent of working well with people. You're unlikely to train missing talents into the person later. You can try, but then, you are not building on the employee's strengths which 80,000 managers, via Gallup's research, highly recommend.

The recommendation? Hire for strengths; don't expect to develop weak areas of performance, habits, and talents. Build on what is great about your new employee in the first place.

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