Talent attracts talent | Michael Page

By understanding employee motivation, you can improve the way your company works. How? Both parties need to understand each other’s needs and seek to satisfy each other’s expectations. The best way to do this is through genuine conversations that reflect every real-life expectations of work and the wider world.

Recruitment is transforming away from the transactional view that money is the primary motivator, and from one-size-fits-all products like today’s job descriptions, towards tomorrow’s greater focus on purpose and personalisation. By understanding your employees better, via assessment, listening and training, it is possible to recruit the best available people for the present and the future.

During the talent acquisition process, potential applicants must be able to project themselves into the team, company and role. There needs to be genuine communication. And, the evolution of the role and the company itself should be visible to engage your candidate pool.

So, how can you use your employees to hire the best available people for any given role?

Key Insight: When employers understand their employee's motivation and drivers, they can use this information to attract better candidates via their employer branding.

The Future of Hiring

Employee ambassadors offer authenticity

If you can turn your best employees into brand ambassadors, you help to create an open, transparent first line of peer-review for the company. According to recent studies, 36% of companies use this method to attract managers, helping them find the best available profiles faster.

Using employees to help source candidates leverages your employer branding in a powerful way. Your current employees become ambassadors for the company and brand, and the conversations they have are genuine, from person to person. It allows you as a hiring manager to access wider, more balanced candidate lists as recommendations often come on a personal level, with buy-in from your current employees of exactly what kind of personality will fit.

Julien Gibert, Executive Director PageGroup Switzerland, says:

“People sharing the same values and having acquaintances in the company are more likely to stay. Making your employees part of the hiring process can widen your search and talent pool. Your overall recruiting process can gain in speed and efficiency – important factors in a highly competitive and candidate-driven market.”

This feedback helps drive teams forward, as it gives visibility on any issues the team might have – and what is working well and could be used to help other teams. To be better advocates for the company, employees need to be fulfilled at work. Through feedback, the manager can pre-empt problems if there are any, or continue with policies that help drive employee engagement.

This has led to an increase in the number of companies using feedback from their employees to better understand satisfaction and engagement, and their level of commitment. This is often done via yearly or quarterly questionnaires, giving the company a barometer on their employee's happiness, helping management to motivate the team.

Julien Gibert sees it the following way:

“People aligned to a company’s values often know people like them. They can therefore use their existing network to identify potential talent. At Michael Page, we integrate our employees in every step of the hiring process - from sourcing potential employees to making them part of the interviewing process (through live role plays and opened conversations) to selecting the right candidate. Rewarding and incentivising employees for their support to identify future talent is a real plus and shows your appreciation.”

Key Insight: By using employees as head-hunters employers create authentic conversations during the recruitment process, giving the potential applicant the ability to project into the team

Showing examples of personal and professional development

Giving young adults more skills before they leave education will help them thrive in the modern world. Teaching soft, behavioural skills and giving training that corresponds to the needs of business is key in helping companies stay competitive in a demanding market. Assessment centres help businesses go further in understanding the behavioural skills, motivation and personality of potential applicants.

Depending on the career level of the candidate being assessed, their creativity, leadership, and adaptability are tested, revealing skills not covered by looking at experience or hard technical skills.

These assessments are very useful for differentiating between three profiles: graduates with little experience, people coming from low-paid, repetitive work, and candidates with professional experience in a different function or sector. People from these groups need to be assessed in different ways, as their work history is narrow, or their past is viewed with bias regarding their skills.

Assessing them by using role-plays, scenarios and group work helps to detect people who have transferrable skills and cognitive abilities that may have been missed by looking at the static CV of the present.

Key Insight: Assessing candidates' skills through role-plays, scenarios and group work reveals hidden depths to behavioural skills profiles, specifically with recent graduates, low-paid workers and seniors from other sectors

How can you attract better candidates?

Employees need to be understood and respected as individuals. They can no longer be treated as an indistinct mass. To recruit the right employees for your business there needs to be a personalisation of human resource management, starting from the job briefing, to the job advert, the process, and into the onboarding and beyond.

The need to test for skills outside of technical areas is obvious. It opens the field of candidates, helping companies find the best available profiles, people with the cognitive, behavioural skills that will grow with the role and any future one.

To recruit for the future, hiring managers and recruiters need to form a partnership focused on two key areas: locating the right personalities with a mix of emotional intelligence and cognitive skills, and, through working together, change perspectives on what makes the best candidate.

“It is not about having more candidates, but having more candidates with the right capabilities and mindset to help your company succeed in future. Cooperating with educational institutes and addressing real needs clearly help overcoming skill caps. The ripple effect can pay off quite quickly when doing the right things. Your company will benefit from a better skilled candidate pipeline, a better reputation in the market and a better positioning as an employer of choice.” , so Julien Gibert, ED PageGroup Switzerland.

Key Insight: Candidates and employees alike need to be treated with respect and as individuals throughout the relationship, starting with the recruitment process through and beyond onboarding.