A significant part of my work involves helping leaders and managers develop and enhance the performance of their people. When they have a team that is engaged, committed and intrinsically motivated they can do great things together. The challenge, however, is to build such a team. The crucial first step is to recruit the right people for the right positions.

Jim Collins made a strong point of this in his classic, all time, bestseller book, “Good to Great”. While it was written in 2001, these comments he made have resonated with so many leaders ever since and have been constantly quoted. He said that the first thing great leaders do is get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus), and then get those right people in the right seats. Those leaders together with their people, he said, will move their organisations from being good organisations to being great ones.

Of course, no leaders set out to hire the wrong person. In fact the person they hire may have a very impressive resume. He/she may have performed brilliantly in the interview. The referees all stacked up well. They still might not be the right cultural fit for the organisation and this becomes apparent in a very short time.

Sometimes, especially in regional and rural areas, it becomes difficult to get the right people. Applicants are scarce and because the organization desperately needs someone to do the work, they employ someone they wouldn’t employ if they had a choice. Technically they might be able to do the work, but again socially they don’t fit, lacking the soft skills to work within a team.

And we could go on with other examples that I have experienced in my work, being called into organisations to “fix” people who should not have been employed in the first place for that position.

This is why it is good decision making to engage a recruitment specialist to hire the right people for the right positions for you. While many of the small businesses and professional service firms I work with hesitate to do that citing the cost, it is in fact a wise investment. In fact when you factor in the costs, both financially and emotionally, the cost of the recruitment specialist is not high. What price do you put on the financial and emotional impact in hiring the wrong person for the job? What is the cost of the stress caused to you of managing their low performance or their negative attitude and their impact on the morale of the team? When you may inevitably have to let them go, again stressful and maybe even damaging to your organisational reputation and brand, there is the time and cost involved in recruiting someone else, training them and orienting them to the role.

Many of the organisations that I work with, who have never engaged a recruitment specialist, also are not clear on how such a professional would really help. They do not appreciate the value that professional can add. That’s why when I met Jacqui Edge from Envisage HR Solutions here in Geelong, I invited here to talk with me about her work in helping leaders engage the right people for the right positions.

If you click on the image below you will be taken to an interview I did with Jacqui in my Leadership Conversations series. You can listen to it immediately (40 minutes) or you can download it to listen at a later time.

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