Recruiting and hiring is just like advertising and marketing. In marketing and advertising you speak to your prospective customers in a certain way, using specific language and tone. The same is true in how you talk to recruits and new hires. How you talk to homeowners and prospects to make them customers, the same is true in recruiting and hiring canvassers. It’s about developing the relationship. All too often, in both canvassing for leads and hiring people we jump too quickly to the ‘sale’. In the presentation at the door a canvasser will attempt to close for an appointment long before he or she has earned the right to. In hiring, we’re too quick to want to fill our roster rather than take the time to get to know the recruit and develop a relationship with them. No one ever gets married on the first date; it takes rapport building before you can ever walk down the aisle.
Ask yourself, how are you interviewing right now? Are you churning and burning new hires? Are they getting burned out long before they get past the honeymoon stage? What’s your recruiting and hiring process?
You’re looking to start a relationship with this person. You’re going to commit time, money and resources. So you want people who are committed to you. I prefer group interviews because it lets you speak to many. A one on one interview can get weird. Often you’re trying to sell the benefits of the job. Then you’re asking them for their strengths and weaknesses. It’s somewhat an adversarial situation.
All you’re looking for is if they qualify for the job.
I go beyond the pay and bonuses of the typical interview. I lay it on the line up front.
- Performance base pay (speaks to and attracts the real type of person you want)
- Climbing the ladder (quantifiable promotions – giving them the path to promotion, again speaking to the ideal candidate). Part of this is they have to help and coach other canvassers to become successful (Marine attitude of train your subordinate to replace you in your job) You want performance-minded people
- Selling the life-skills (direct sales skills – T.V. show Shark Tank (Cuban/Johns) related to a story of person selling belts door to door. Hone your chops.
It’s ok to tell people they’re going to have to work. It’s ok to tell them they’re going to get rejection.
The Interview
I’m going to work from the perspective that you’re conducting a group interview as the initial interview with recruits. From the group interview you want people who will raise their hand and say this job sounds like it’s for me.
From here you can conduct a one on one. The dynamics of the one on one are much different at this point because the candidate sitting in front of you has already made a mental decision. Unlike a traditional interview, there’s little to no ‘selling’ going on from either side of the desk.
Just like the group interview, your one on one interview should be scripted or at least choreographed. When you ask the right questions you’ll generate the right answers. But what are the right answers? I’m referring to the answers that will reveal who the candidate really is. You want questions that invoke emotional, visceral responses.
The Hiring Process
A question I get asked often by canvassing recruiters is, “When should I hire them?” They want to know if they should hire them on the spot or let the candidate leave the interview and then call them back. Unfortunately this question can’t warrant a definite answer. It truly depends. If you feel good about them, hire them on the spot. Trust your gut. Consider when your next training date will be and get them scheduled. Sometimes you have to roll the dice and take a chance.
Regardless of when you hire them the fact is you hired them and often there’s a period of time while they wait to go into training. It’s ideal if you can start training on a Monday, though it’s not always possible. The key is what you do with your new hire in the interim between their hire and the start of training.
What you do in this time gap is critical. It’s where the ball is getting dropped by too many recruiters. Regardless of how much time you’re talking about you should be using it to maintain the relationship. When you hire them, they’re excited, but when it comes time for training, they may get cold feet, have second thoughts and they don’t show up for training.
It’s happened. I recall one new hire that would have been perfect for the position, unfortunately between the time he was hired and was to start training he got a call from a recruiter in the field of his major and he decided to follow it. It happens and in most you can’t control this.
Think about a college sports coach. He or she can be recruiting a player up to a year before they’ll ever attend the college. The coach has to maintain communication and relationship with the recruit to keep them connected and excited about their decision. Often times they give out their personal cell phone number and maintain regular phone and text communications with them. You need to do the same. You have to make a big deal over their hire. This is going to be their home, they need to feel welcome.
In a previous series I referenced the book “Semper Fi – Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way”. The Marines are masters at recruiting and developing and maintaining their relationship with recruits. I experienced this firsthand. Many years ago my younger cousin graduated high school and had enrolled in the Marines. At his graduation party all the family gathered as did his recruiting officer. There at the party was a person I didn’t recognize. I struck up a conversation with him and asked how he knew my cousin. He told me that he was my cousin’s recruiter in the Marines and he wanted to attend his graduation party.
The fact he was there demonstrated the value they put on their relationship with my cousin. I remember the recruiter telling me that my cousin had made a commitment to the corps and in turn the corps was committed to him. People continue to work where they do because they like the people they work with. The big reason people leave their employment is because they don’t like the people they work with.
A casual conversation over coffee or lunch can go a long way in keeping a new recruit connected to the job. The social situation will nurture conversation that will give you deeper insight into the person they are, as well as being able to reinforce the benefits of the job, the life-skills it’ll teach. You don’t want the next communication after hiring them to be training.
When I ran my home improvement company we invited a team of new hires to a preseason Cleveland Browns game. They were told it was just a casual get together, had nothing to do with work, but they were welcome to join us for the food and tailgate party before the game and then we’d all go to the game. We hired 5 people and invited all 5. 3 out of the 5 showed up for the game and on Monday morning, only those 3 that had joined us at the game showed up for training. 1 of the 2 that didn’t come to the game did show up for training only because he was friends with 1 new hire who had come to the game and he heard what great time we had.
It’s not science, but it demonstrates my point, people work with people they know and like. It makes people comfortable with you. It’s no different than starting and nurturing a personal relationship.
That’ll wrap it up for this article. If you have questions pertaining to this subject or any other article you can submit them to me at www.AskTheCanvassKing.com.
You can hear more detail about this month’s management subject on the recording of the live Silver Level Telecoaching call from August 28, 2013. If you’re not a Silver Level member you can discover more by clicking on this link.