“More customers and more staff are the two most common recruitment needs of most successful organizations.” Larry Mandelberg
Tired of looking for staff and finding ten “maybe” candidates for every “WOW” candidate? According to Einstein, doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. If you want to get consistently better candidates (different results), you have to try something different. And I don’t mean using the same approach with different recruiting platforms.
Having owned 13+ businesses, I have great empathy for the difficulties of recruiting in today’s enlightened, post-pandemic environment. If you want to attract and retain top quality candidates eager to work and committed to your business, you must change the way you reach out to them.
Make three changes to the tone and language of your recruiting messages and you’ll get engaged candidates every time. The time savings alone will be worth a small fortune.
In my book, Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide, I talk about recruiting in chapters 4-6.
From chapter five, What You Want Your Business to Become: Vision Statement
More customers and more staff are the two most common recruitment needs of most successful organizations. Any business overtly pursuing a comprehensible vision will naturally attract client and employee prospects who want to work with like-minded people and companies striving to realize their vision too.
When you share your vision in the hiring process and both you and your candidate agree to engage, the candidate will see themselves as self-selecting. These are the people you want to have on board. These are the people who will be as passionate about your vision as you are.
When passion for common needs and wants exists, many of the obstacles of recruitment, retention, and engagement melt away.
Achieving a business vision is typically too big for one person acting alone. When you can clearly communicate your vision, others aligned with it will be drawn to you and your pursuit of it, eager to join your team and be an active contributor to its pursuit.
From chapter six, The Value Your Business Delivers: Mission Statement
The mission statement is the tactical component of purpose. Outwardly facing, it tells your target market why they should do business with you. It should be designed with your prospects in mind and written in their language.
Your mission statement will have value internally when used … in psychological and recruiting benefits. Think of it as the organization’s promise to every customer. Use it to guide sales efforts and maintain focus on delivering value to the right customers.
When you identify your target market, why your business is valuable to them, and how you deliver that value in your recruitment messaging, you are clarifying why you exist, explaining what prospects can be a part of, and explaining why their work will be important and valued. You are giving prospects three valuable pieces of information they can use to evaluate your opportunity in advance.
The more candidates know what you do and their role in contributing to it, the more likely they will be to embrace your opportunity with enthusiasm and be eager to contribute.
From chapter four, The Cultural Framework: Values Statements
When your firm has a reputation for having a great culture, being trustworthy, and having engaged employees that have been there a long time, other people want to join with you. Recruiting is already expensive, difficult, and risky. It becomes much cheaper, easier, and less speculative when you have prequalified candidates who are clear on why they want to work for your firm, are eager to do so, and are actively coming to you.
A healthy, positive environment driven by a happy, productive workforce will, over time, reject individuals in conflict with it. In short, if you want to play with us, you need to fit in and contribute. When that happens, your staff has begun to learn how to be less dependent on a manager and more self-reliant.
Every individual has values and a personal, self-defined cultural comfort zone. Every business is a combination of the individuals that run it. Therefore, every business also has values and a culture. In the better businesses, culture and values are by design and aligned rather than being an unintegrated amalgamation of differences and conflicts.
Design your culture with values statements and proactively create the work environment you want and attract others with similar interests to it to work with you.
In summary…
- Your values statements are the bricks you use to build your company’s culture.
- Your mission statement is an externally focused commitment to prospects and customers.
- Your vision statement is an internally focused commitment to staff and all internal stakeholders.
Including these chunks of data about your employment opportunity shifts the burden of extrinsically creating desire (persuasion) to work for your business from you to each candidate by creating an intrinsic desire to join your team and its pursuits. Kind if magical, yes? Best of all, it works.
The opportunities to be part of my clients’ journeys are how we grow and learn. As far as what the future holds, it should be clear at this point that nobody knows. Of all the things we could do to survive, I can’t tell you what’s right. I can tell you what works and get you pointed in the right direction.
Want to stop fighting for staff? Want your staff to love their job, their coworkers, their company, and their superiors? Then you need to create your vision, mission, and values statements and bring them to life. Recruitment and retention are wonderful reasons to begin now.
If you want to talk about how to develop and implement purpose statements for your organization, email me at larry@mandelberg.biz or call 916-798-0600.
