Some Kidding Aside – Always Be Recruiting!

One of the questions I am most frequently asked these days is: How do we hire quality employees who want to work?

My answer is pretty simple, really: Always be recruiting.

Recently, when I was speaking at a school nutrition conference, I asked for volunteers to stand up and tell me their best customer service story. One woman stood up and told me that she and some friends were eating at a pizza restaurant one night when their waiter seemed to get everything wrong. Their whole evening was a comedy of customer-service errors–wrong orders to the wrong people who were charged the wrong amounts.

As they finished their meal, the manager came over to their table, apologized for the problems, gave them a discount, and then offered everyone in their party a gift certificate to make up for their bad experience.

The lady telling me the story said she noticed that the manager had an excellent customer service ethic and thought she would make a wonderful team member. So, right then and there, she began trying to recruit the manager!

“You’ve really done a great job taking care of us tonight!” she told the manager. “Pardon me for asking, but do you have kids?”

“I sure do!” the manager replied. “I have an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old, but I don’t get to spend much time with them because I’m here at work all the time.”

“If you worked with us at the school, you would be getting home from work about the same time as your kids get home from school!”

The woman went on to list all of the benefits of working in the school nutrition department, and then traded contact with the restaurant manager before leaving.

As she was telling the story, I got the feeling that this wasn’t the first time she had done this, neither would it be the last. She realized that you don’t wait until you have a job opening to recruit. If you happen to run across a qualified candidate, initiate the conversation right then!

Maybe something will come of it and maybe it won’t, but if you are constantly reaching out to qualified, sharp people, then you are less likely to be scratching your head and wondering what you’re going to do when you do have a job opening on your team.

So, my question to you is simple: Are you ready right now, at this very moment, to give me 4-5 reasons why someone should join your team? Can you give me a bullet point list of what makes your organization a good fit for a potential employee? If you can’t answer that question, then how could you expect anyone else to want to join your team?