Recruitment Strategies: The Secret to Faster, Cheaper, and More Effective Hiring

<div class="grey-callout"><h2>Key Takeaways</h2><ul>
<li>Avoid focusing solely on the top 10%: Recruiting only "A-players" can be expensive, time-consuming, and create unrealistic expectations.</li>
<li>Aim to recruit  "Great Performers": Hire those who meet Minimum Acceptable Standards and are a good cultural fit.</li>
<li>Surprising benefits: You may not need to pay such a high salary if you don't recruit from the top 10%.</li>
<li>Simplify processes and offer training: Ensure employees can achieve success and develop within the company.</li>
<li>Don’t tolerate Poor Performers: They can damage your brand, productivity, and retention.</li>
</ul></div>

An importantSECRET is knowing who is right for your business. So in this chapter, I will define who’s “right” for your business and look at a document I call the Great Performance Profile to help you define if a candidate is a good fit. But first, I want to ensure you don’t fall into the trap of chasing unicorns.

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Don’t Recruit ONLY the Top 10% / A-Players

Some businesses try recruiting only “the top 10% of talent”, “A-players”, “unicorns”, or people “better than you”. I generally disagree. Not necessarily because this isn’t a competitive advantage – it can be – but because it’s often easier and more cost-effective to play a different game. Additionally, some hiring managers don’t believe they can recruit highly talented staff because their business isn’t successful enough (Keller, 2017).

Implementing a “top 10%” strategy is very difficult, and if you fall into the top 10% trap, beware that:

1. Recruitment is more expensive and time-consuming: Because you’re chasing a small number of jobseekers, you must use more costly and laborious methods. For example, I’ve seen hiring managers go to significant lengths, such as creating bespoke recruitment videos or “sell packets”, to stand out.
2. Recruitment is more competitive: You spend a fortune positioning and branding as an “employer of choice”, only to compete against other employers who say similar things.
3. Recruitment is slow: Vacancies can remain unfilled for longer, so the organisation misses the value those roles should add.
4. New staff have unrealistic expectations: When employees join, their expectations may have been hyped up; when reality hits home, they’re more likely to become disillusioned and leave.
5. New staff have high salaries: You pay staff a fortune because you’ve positioned the business as so successful that a high salary is expected.
6. Retaining staff is stressful: You’re constantly worried – for good reason – that someone will poach your staff

Compounding this, companies with a top 10% culture often sack the bottom 10%, regardless of whether these employees are doing a good job. This “rank-and-fire” model was first introduced in the 1980s by Jack Welch at General Electric and had unforeseen consequences, including:

• Unnecessary dismissals: Even if an employee did a good job, if they were just in the bottom 10%, they were arbitrarily dismissed.
• Detrimental to reputation: Firms with a reputation for using “rank-and-fire” make recruiting harder.
• Impacted staff ambition: Employees may not want to be promoted if they are relegated to the bottom 10% of their new grade.
• Reduced productivity: Managers intentionally recruit poor-quality employees to make up the bottom 10% and “save” incumbents with whom they have a strong relationship.
• Disengaged and unmotivated staff: As a result of unnecessary internal competition, internal politics, and fear.

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Recruit Everyone Capable of Meeting Minimum Acceptable Standards

My preferred approach is to:

• Recruit the top 10% when you can: Without going to unnecessary effort to attract them.
• Recruit Great Performers: Candidates that meet Minimum Acceptable Standards required for success.
• Simplify business processes: Help employees achieve Minimum Acceptable Standards and, where appropriate, provide staff with the technology and tools needed to become more effective.
• Offer training: Develop existing staff and give employees opportunities to develop specific skills for your business.

The benefits of my approach are:

1. Recruitment is less expensive and time-consuming: There is no need to create a perception that your business is great to work for.
2. Recruitment is less competitive: You can find Great Performers among the 90% that other employers aren’t so obsessed with.
3. Recruitment is faster: Filling your jobs means you start adding value sooner.
4. New staff have realistic expectations: They are content with the reality of the business.
5. New staff don’t have high salaries: Whilst they are still paid well, they don’t have unrealistic expectations because you’ve not created a perception of excess.
6. Improved retention rates: Increased productivity, faster growth, and higher net profit because you aren’t waiting to find new staff.

You may notice that these are the opposite of employers stuck in the “top 10% trap”!

Understand that I’m not advocating hiring Poor Performers. I’m just urging you not to restrict yourself to some arbitrary 10% figure, especially as you may already be recruiting from a small talent pool, which will likely be even smaller for niche and skilled roles tied to specific locations.

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<span class="purple-callout"><p>A friendly nudge – I'm available for advice or practical assistance. Let's book a call.</p><p>You may find my best-selling talent acquisition book useful.</p><p>And for only £199, I can advertise a job on the leading UK sites.</p></span>

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Great Performers Meet Minimum Acceptable Standards

To further understand who the “right” staff may be, I developed some categories of employees. I appreciate you may not like to judge and categorise other people, but it’s kinder all around to make clear-headed, considered decisions in business. I use the following categories that apply to all roles, whether generalist or specialist, whatever the department or level of seniority:

• Great Performers: Regularly meet or exceed Minimum Acceptable Standards (MAS) and are a good cultural fit.
• Good Performers: Sometimes meet MAS and are a good cultural fit. You could try developing them into a Great Performer with training or by improving processes. It’s perfectly acceptable to keep Good Performers. These employees are conscientious, don’t require much management, positively contribute to the culture and are a real asset to an organisation.
• Poor Performers: Regularly fall below MAS or are a poor cultural fit, and don’t improve even with training and coaching.

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Don’t tolerate Poor Performers

Poor Performers are an interesting category of employee. They occur because:

• Mis-hire: You’ve simply recruited the wrong person.
• Poor performance management: Even Great or Good Performers can become Poor Performers when they have unclear expectations and management avoids giving constructive feedback.
• New stage in business life cycle: Sometimes, a business has moved through its life cycle and requires more specialists and professional management – the generalists who were once Great Performers now find themselves floundering in specialist roles.

Your organisation can hit the rocks when you tolerate even one Poor Performer:

• You incur a lost opportunity cost: Resulting from an employee not carrying out their role correctly. The cost might seem relatively low for entry-level and front-line positions, but the cumulative cost can be massive if they work closely with your customers. Poor Performers in management and leadership roles can cause irreparable damage to a business. Additionally, you have less time to nurture Great Performers.
• Poor performance causes disruption: You must manage Poor Performers, fix their broken relationships and deal with the inevitable disruption!
• Your Great Performers may leave: Particularly if they get fed up with being held back by Poor Performers. Often, you won’t realise until it’s too late.
• Damaged brand: Your organisation develops a reputation for having a high staff turnover and tolerating mediocrity, making it even harder to recruit Great Performers.
• Poor Performers become a burden: You have to do their job, which saps your energy and productivity and puts pressure on you and your family.
• Profits suffer: You still need to pay a Poor Performer! 

I cover how to dismiss Poor Performers if you're at that point.

<span class="grey-callout"><span class="text-color-purple">Take Action:</span>  Write down the name of everyone you’ve hired over the past year (preferably longer) and determine the percentage of Great Performers, Good Performers and Poor Performers.<p></p>Now, you have a baseline to track success.<p></p>If 50% of employees can be considered Great or Good, when you want to fill 10 roles, you’ll need to recruit 20 because you’ll dismiss 10. For an annual salary of £36,000, a 50% success rate means you’ll lose £360,000.<p></p>That may sound like a high failure rate, but when I start working with some organisations, 50% is a realistic figure.<p></p>Ideally, you should aim for 90%+ of hires to be Good or Great Performers. I use 90% rather than 100% because recruitment will always be an approximate science.</span>

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Additional Resources

• Talent Acquisition Book; The Secrets of Great Recruitment: How to Recruit Great Employees.
• Downloadable PDF guide; Realistic Recruitment: The "Perfect" Employee Doesn't Exist.
• Downloadable PDF guide; Ditch Job Descrptions: How to Write Great Performance Profiles.
• Article; Writing a Job Description: The Game-Changing Template Your Need Now.
• Article; How to Write a Job Description: Crafting a Practical Document.
• Article; Do You Need to Recruit A-Players and Unicorns? A Simple Guide to Finding Great Employees.