David Guest | How To Identify and Recruit Talented Team Members

This document outlines the process of recruiting a talented team members. By following and modeling this system, you will have an effective and customised recruitment process that that will help you find – and keep – good people.

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System Architect: David Guest
Website: www.outcomesbusinessgroup.com.au
Generated as part of the www.BusinessSystemsSummit.com

System Details

Step 1. Ensure you’re clear on who you are as an organisation 

  • Invest the time to build a picture of the organisation that’s going to attract the right type of candidate.
     
  • Clearly define your organisational structure
     
  • Be clear on the organisation’s vision, mission and culture

Tip! A result of creating an organisation that attracts high calibre candidates, is that inevitably, you’re going to attract low calibre candidates as well – this is why you will use the following steps to filter applicants.

Step 2 – Define your ideal employee and their attitude

  • Clearly define the position, prepare the contract/job description
     
  • When crafting your job ad, don’t just list out the minimum requirements to complete the job, tell the story of your organisation and where it’s going in future.
    • Remember! You want to attract people who love what the company does, rather than people who just have the skillset required to do the job. You also want to attract people who have an attitude that aligns with your company’s core values.

Tip! Hire with the philosophy that attitude trumps skill. Obviously you need both but it’s recommend evaluating attitude first, then skill. It’s done this way because attitude is generally something that can’t be taught whereas skill can be taught.

Step 3. List your ad on your preferred platform

  • Ensure everything makes sense and that everything relating to the job is laid out clearly.
     
  • Rather than listing out your phone number, or giving an email address to send resumes to, create a filtering mechanism.

Step 4. Create a filtering mechanism

  • When it comes to attitude v’s skill: skill can be measured through testing or certification, but the only way that you can measure someone’s attitude is to ask them to do something and observe how they respond to your request.
     
  • Create tasks for the applicants to complete and observe their behaviours so we can get a good idea of their attitude.
    • Create a voicemail/recorded message that has 3 questions – this creates an even playing field, all candidates are getting the same information. This also allows you to listen to the recording of the applicant so you can share with others in the organisation and get their opinion.
       
    • This will probably filter about 50% of applicants straight away as often people will just send their resume, hoping that it’s enough to get them the job, even though the ad says ‘don’t send your resume, ring this number’.
       
    • This also allows you to systemise the filtering process, the owner doesn't have to speak with every applicant, only those who are shortlisted.
       

Suggestion! If you have a lot of candidates who made it past the ‘first hurdle’, you might consider a group interview. If you only have a handful of candidates, you might opt to shortcut the group interview and go straight to the individual interview process.

Step 5. Conduct a group interview with all of your filtered applicants.

  • This allows you to interview anywhere between 3 – 50 candidates, which is a huge time saver.
    • Note down things about each applicant. Eg: Did they show up on time? How were they dressed? What was the dynamic between them and the other candidates? This helps to get a good picture of attitude and often there are a small number or people that shine/stand out.

Step 6. Set up one on one interviews with the short list of applicants from the group interview.

  • Ask applications questions to determine if they’re the right fit for your company and the role. Refer to “Top Grading” by Brad Smart.
     
  • Set some test tasks to ‘test drive’ the applicant.

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