When it comes to running a business in a sensible, profitable way, having a process can be an important part of success. This is especially true in electrical construction, where someone just working any way they feel like and ignoring standards and protocols is basically courting disaster.
That’s one of the reasons why, when it comes to recruiting, some people take the position that the classic “slow and steady wins the race” approach is the correct one. After all, if you’re going to be hiring someone, you want to make sure that the person is right for the job, and perhaps that means being as meticulous as possible in investigating all avenues.
But this can also mean that you’re losing a lot of time, and, in the process, you may even lose great candidates if they are snapped up by agile, more aggressive companies that can make offers similar to your—or in some cases, perhaps even less attractive—in a more timely, solid fashion.
Keep Things Moving
Urgency when it comes to a hiring policy is not about working in a stressed, panic-stricken manner as if there’s a crisis that needs to be dealt with. Urgency in hiring isn’t even necessarily about moving quickly, though that’s often a component of a hiring urgency style.
What hiring urgency is primarily about is an active, agile, and transparent process, where you, and potentially your candidates, can see tangible progress being made towards decisions and resolutions.
For example, a company that is recruiting that finds a very promising new potential employee, but then shuts down all channels of communication for a month while deliberation goes on behind closed doors, may find that when they finally get around to contacting their desired hire, the person has already taken up an offer with another company. That hire may simply say “After hearing nothing for so long, I assumed the answer was going to be no,” especially when compared to the company they agreed to work for that informed them of the decision process, how it was going, and kept them “in the loop” about what was happening and how close to the point they were on a decision being made.
It’s obviously important to think carefully about finding the right candidate for a job. But there needs to be a middle ground between taking all the time in the world, and being too hasty in making a decision. After all, while it might be an extreme case, when it comes to an organ transplant, most people won’t simply accept the first organ that comes along, but neither will they wait until the exactly the right organ with just the right texture and coloration is finally available.
Good employees are valuable, and you’re not the only company that realizes that. There’s a limited pool of quality talent, and if you’re not prepared to work diligently and interact in a more proactive way with good, potential candidates, someone else will, and that could cost you a valuable employee.
