Hiring Wisdom: Here’s Why You Shouldn’t Work Here

Note: The following are selections from the Humetrics blog.

Employee experience

Regular readers here will know I’m always touting employee stay conversations because they create high levels of employee engagement and are a powerful retention tool. If you haven’t bought in to their value yet, consider this excerpt from a Forbes.com article:

“Fred Reichheld, creator of the well-known Net Promoter System, says companies ‘can’t earn the loyalty of customers without first generating enthusiastic engagement and loyalty from employees, especially frontline employees.’ The evidence bears this out. When the Medallia Institute compared employee engagement and customer loyalty across more than 130 retail outlets, we found that stores with more engaged employees (measured by the likelihood that they would recommend the store as a place to work) had customer loyalty ratings that were 12 percent higher than stores with less engaged employees. Stores with high employee engagement also achieved greater increases in customer loyalty year-over-year, while stores with low employee engagement saw loyalty drop. According to Bain & Company, a five percent increase in customer loyalty can increase a company’s profitability by 25 to 95 percent.”

Promote from within first

Before you post an online ad for a new employee, be sure to look at the people already on board. Perhaps someone on staff could easily do the job or there might be someone who this job would be a stretch for, but who deserves the opportunity to grow. Promoting from within motivates your entire staff and it’s nice to discover the person you need is a person you had the good sense to hire two years ago.

Ask why you shouldn’t work here

If you’ve seen any of my hourly employee recruiting, selection, retention presentations, you might remember I urged you to create a list of the “Top 10 Reasons Someone Should Want to Work for Your Organization.” It is a wonderful focusing tool that can help you recruit, interview, and retain talented folks at every level. (Besides, if you don’t know why someone should want to work for you, how can anyone else possibly know?)

You can also reverse engineer this concept to get “The Top Reasons Someone Should NOT Work for Your Organization” and use it as a screening tool. What if, every time you made a job offer, you also gave the person a list something like the following?

Top 5 reasons not to work here

You don’t think it’s important to be on time every day.
You’d rather go it alone than be a team player.
You need constant supervision.
You refuse to be held accountable and are a master of making excuses.
You believe that although hard work may pay off later, laziness pays off now.

Employee experience

Regular readers here will know I’m always touting employee stay conversations because they create high levels of employee eng

agement and are a powerful retention tool. If you haven’t bought in to their value yet, consider this excerpt from a Forbes.com article:

Promote from within first

Ask why you shouldn’t work here

Top 5 reasons not to work here

You don’t think it’s important to be on time every day.

You’d rather go it alone than be a team player.

You need constant supervision.

You refuse to be held accountable and are a master of making excuses.

You believe that although hard work may pay off later, laziness pays off now.