Tom Stubbs guest blogs:

Think about who drives your business, is it the product, or is it the people?

The product is what the people drive and without the right people your product will get nowhere.

To drive the organisation you need the right people with the right skills in place so you have the rigorous drive that will get you places. There are five things that companies need to think about when it comes to recruitment, and it’s not always that obvious;

• Look beyond the CV. CVs are there to sell the Job Seeker, but most of them haven’t been trained in sales, they’ve been trained in what they do. So, it’s not a 100% match on paper, they may be in interview.
• Does the person fit? Skills are one thing, having a structural fit is something entirely different. Does your organisation show the right determination to keep someone there who has the right skills, but do you believe the concept of a work life balance is false? Each person has a different opinion on this, and making sure that both the skills and the person match is extremely difficult.
• Life beyond work – People are involved with a whole host of extra circular activities because they see value in it, and often it provides them with extra skills; leadership, motivation, and quite often, skills that could be passed on into the workplace. Think of people who are involved with a sports club, they could be the Chair-person and the Treasurer, what skills could they bring into the business that you missed out when only looking at the jobs they’ve put down on their CV.
• Team dynamic – the right people can drive a team forward, the wrong person can drag it down. So at interview level, have a member of the team come in and ask the questions, you’ll probably get a better understanding if the person is going to fit or not.
• Give people opportunity to grow. Business expansion is always about what skills people have, if there is no opportunity to grow people, people are less likely to invest their time into your business. You won’t keep them there. It’s career development.

“Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t want to” – Richard Branson.

Tom Stubbs.

(Tom is an experienced recruitment consultant who was coerced into writing a guest blog after kindly popping in – thanks Tom!)

(Image credit notegraphy.com)