Two of the most searched terms that lead people to this blog are “Can my competition steal my employees?” and “How do I keep my competition from stealing my employees?”. I have written about the latter here.

As for the answer to “can my competition steal my employees?”, of course they can. Employees are not your property that you purchase. You pay them to perform a service but you do not own them. You may put contracts or non-compete agreements in place that make it difficult for them to leave, but ultimately if they want to go work elsewhere they are going to do it.

So how do you stop it? Make them not want to leave. Seriously. I’m not being trite or simplistic. It is the truth. Employees stay where they feel engaged, appreciated and connected. They want to feel valued and that their work makes a difference.

When leaders ask me how to get competition to stop stealing their staff I ask them if they have asked their staff why they want to leave. Crickets. And there’s the problem….

Talk to your employees. Find out what they like and do not like. Try to make accommodations to things that might make their working environment more enjoyable. Be connected.

It really is that simple.

This past weekend I drove to my hometown of Lousiville, KY with my three year old. The only way to survive a typical six hour drive which turns into 7.5 is the focus on milestones. If my only goal is to make it to Louisville it is going to seem like the longest ride ever. If I focus however on where we typically stop for lunch and just try to get there and then refocus on where we take a bathroom break and then the final destination it seems to be less daunting. Breaking my overall goal up into milestones makes it seem more achievable and makes me aware of my progress when I actually get to each stop along the way.

Breaking goals up into chunks make them easier to digest. In the business world, this is seen most evidently in performance metrics. Giving employees one big honking (technical term) performance metric they have to meet by year’s end may be more overwhelming than giving them smaller doses that they need to achieve within that year. Then in the end, performance could be rewarded by overall goal AND percent to milestones rather than just on overall goal.

I have seen it work quite successfully.

In July, I will be hosting a webinar dedicated to performance management and how to implement a program. You will definitely see this as part of the discussion as I think it can be a valuable way to measure.

Have you worked in an environment that measured milestones as well as overall goal? How did it work? Did you like breaking the goal up or did you find meeting the milestones harder or unnecessary? I would love to hear others thoughts on this one.

Photo: Andrew Kuchling

A few years ago when I was still in corporate America, I worked with a hiring manager who always stated that he “only hired smart people”. I really do not know how he knew they were smart. We did not give them a test or ask their IQ or ask if they were a member of Mensa. He just knew in the interview whether they were the kind of “smart” he wanted. Only they usually weren’t. He had the highest turnover in the company and his hires often proved they were not the sharpest crayon in the box.

When I first started my business I got a call from a potential client who was looking for sales people. He gave me the job description, told me the basics of the job but then said, “but even if they have the qualifications, I will only hire them if they are funny.” So I asked him how he measured that. Did they have to tell him a joke in the interview process? How do you gauge funny in an interview setting when a candidate is extremely nervous and may want to keep the interview professional – which is what they should do.

Over the weekend I was talking to a recruiter who told me that a hiring manager she is working with just called her and said that while all of the candidates she had sent so far had been qualified, none of them seemed very charismatic. How can you tell that from a resume? Good question. One that neither she nor the hiring manager had an answer too. Nonetheless because the resumes did not seem charismatic, the hiring manager was hesitant to interview them.

I have heard it said before that you should hire for personality and train for skill and while I agree that may work in some situations, requiring someone to be “smart”, “funny” or “charismatic” when you can not even define what that looks like is just silly and sets you up for poor hiring decisions. Smart can be a characteristic that you look for. Charisma certainly helps a person get ahead in an otherwise dull candidate pool. To let those things be your ONLY criteria however seems foolish.

One last thought about the silliness of this. If you say you are only hiring smart people, make sure your current staff fits the bill. When you tell candidates or new hires that they were hired because they were smart and then they find themselves surrounded with less than that, it makes them question their decision. Just a little food for thought…..

Photo: FridayFunStuff1

Being a sole practitioner means juggling a lot of things at once. Like the lady in the picture it may seem like not only are you juggling many things, but all of them are on fire. When you are the only one, getting it all done is definitely a balancing act.

One of the harder items to manage can often be the sourcing and recruitment of new staff. Especially if multiple positions are open at once or if your company is in growth mode, spending the time necessary to find new staff may seem like a daunting task. Many sole practitioners want to be proactive. They want to embrace social media and stop their reliance on job boards or a more passive approach but can not figure out how to squeeze in the time that being proactive takes. How do you sit at your desk to search LinkedIn for potential candidates when you need to work on open enrollment or the latest employee issue or the five people standing outside of your office because their paycheck is wrong?

It is a fair question. One I have a few suggestions for.

Get Training Social recruiting is not something that a novice can jump in to and see immediate results. If you are unfamiliar with how to create search strings or how to determine the best social site for your audience then your efforts may be in vain. More often than not, individuals who give up on social recruiting because it is not working for them are the ones who did not take any time to understand it before jumping in. It not working has more to do with their method than anything else.

The great thing about social recruiting training is that it can be done anywhere, anytime. There are blogs, webinars, conferences and individuals who will come to you on your time. A quick Google search of just the words “social recruiting” returns 212,000,000 results. Find some free time to learn to do it right before jumping in.

Start Slowly and In Conjunction With Your Current Methods Try one thing at a time. Do not switch completely to social recruiting and stop posting on job boards or the other methods you are using until social recruiting is really working for you. Maybe you want to spend a little time on LinkedIn and see how that goes before branching to other sites. Maybe you want to build a Facebook page and make sure you can manage that before moving to Twitter. Social recruiting (and social media in general) does not have to be all at once. Ease into it, see what works and then grow it.

Make It A Priority I’m sure you have seen the quotes about saying you do not have the time means it is not a priority. It is true. You will make time for things that are a priority. If you are not happy with your results from your traditional search methods you have to make changing those a priority. This may mean talking to your boss about shifting priorities or sharing this responsibility with another leader. Either way, it has to become a priority or it will never work.

Sole practitioners may think they do not have time to worry about this social media stuff, but they are missing out on great opportunities to find the best fit for their company rather than hoping the best fit applies along with 5,000 other bad fits. It does take a little time, but can be managed throughout the day and can be implemented slowly. You will never know if it works for your company until you get started.

What would you suggest to someone new to social recruiting?

Photo: MagnusAson

Two words that make me absolutely cringe when I hear them used interchangeably are “orientation” and “on-boarding”. They are not the same thing.

Orientation is a one time event. It usually lasts a day (or less if you do it well) and is an opportunity to share a ton of information that people must know.

Like:
Where the bathrooms are.
What time everyone takes lunch.
Where to park so you do not get towed.

Orientation is meant to share the essentials. It is intended to ensure that new hires get the very basics of what they have and usually includes a lot of paperwork filling out time. It is not very interactive and certainly does not help the new hire after it is over.

On-boarding is much longer. It takes place both before and after the hire. It could last weeks or months – the longer the better. It is meant to introduce and ingrain the company culture and way of working. It should reinforce everything the new hire was told in the recruiting phase. It should incentivize new hires to do their best work until they can do better. Then it should incentivize them to do better. It should make them happy with their decision. It should develop, coach and mentor. It should turn a great hire into a great employee.

See the difference?

Is your company putting new hires through an orientation or an on-boarding?