Here’s how we approach recruitment.

We divide the world up into “good candidates” and “bad candidates”.

We believe that our success at hiring new staff comes down to our ability to tell the good from the bad.

But there’s a problem with this approach. Look at the psychology of this and you will see that it throws the entire responsibility onto the candidate. At the very most we will concede that we let one of the “bad” candidates slip through into the “good” candidate list.

It Takes Two

Although it’s convenient to pass the entire responsibility onto the new employee, the truth is that it takes two. It’s not all about the new candidate.

how to hire

How you manage the new employee once they come on board will determine their success in the role.

And everyone needs managed according to their personality, if you want to see the very best results.

Now in truth most managers manage one way and everyone has to get with their programme or get lost. However the exceptional managers will adjust their approach for each employee, particularly new employees in order to get the very best from them.

Managers Need To Understand Psychology

Taking on a new employee is not like buying a new photocopier. You are dealing with a human and all the little foibles they come with.

What makes managing people so difficult is that what works with one person, doesn’t work with the next.

As a manager you may have searched for the formula to success. I can tell you now you will not find it. And the reason you will not is because there is no one single answer to it all.

You need a different answer for each personality you deal with. Once you accept this fact then you can start to make progress.

Case Study

Let me illustrate by telling you about a client I was working with recently. I will give you the very short version.

The employees were all IT professionals and in the main were found in the North West of the PeopleMaps Personality Map.

Unfortunately all of the managers were sales people and were mostly found in the South East of the PeopleMaps Personality Map.

They couldn’t be more different.

Now this in itself is not a problem. However where the managers thought they had a recruitment problem because so many “bad” candidates were slipping through their recruitment process and getting hired, they actually had a bad management problem.

They were actually hiring the right people. They just didn’t know how to manage them properly. They were trying to manage them the way they liked to be managed.

The result was that employees would not only leave in large numbers but they would usually upset the client in the process. They did not go quietly.

The managers needed to accept that they did not have a recruitment problem. They needed to accept that “Bad” candidates were not slipping through their defenses. They needed to accept that they actually didn’t know how to manage these employees properly.

Summary

Recruiting a new employee is just the beginning of the process, not the end. Don’t expect the employee to change and make all the adaptations to suit your world, as it’s not going to happen. Humans can only stretch so far.

Leave time aside to figure out how to manage this new employee in particular. Assume they will be very different from your other employees.

To speed up this process, get you hands on a PeopleMaps Manager Personality report and it will tell you exactly how to get the best from each of your staff.

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