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“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”

- Chinese Proverb

A constant complaint I hear from business owners is they cannot afford recruiters and/or temporary agencies. Given what most recruiters and temporary agencies charge, I agree with my business owners. Would it not make more sense to find someone who can teach you how to find employees?

When you go fishing, there are certain things that are very important.

What kind of fish are you trying to catch?
Where are you going to be able to catch your type of fish?
What are the proper weather conditions and time of day?
What is the appropriate bait to catch your fish?

Let’s use the above and relate it to recruiting of employees. What I have found over the years, organizations do not know in detail what they are looking for. What skills, values and personality are the best fit for your particular job? Back to our analogy, many organizations decide any fish they can catch will do.

The question of which came first the chicken or the egg has been around for a long time. There is a variation of this question in the area of employee turnover. Which comes first, do you focus on hiring better candidates? Or do you work on the organization by identifying and fixing the root causes of your turnover? In my experience, I see most organizations with high employee turnover trying to recruit their way out of the problem.

In every organization there is a difference between the reality of the organizations’ culture and the culture the leaders’ desire. The leaders then try to drive the culture in the direction they want to go. This is normal and expected. However, this creates an issue which needs to be addressed. How will the organization present the culture to the outside world? I have seen organizations who try to present where they are moving toward as their current culture. But, this culture does not yet exist.

Each client is different and they are facing different problems. However, given what we do, the problems are generally in one of three buckets:

Employee turnover which is severely damaging their business
Chronically open positions which is reducing their capacity and costing them business
A severe skills gap which limits their production and capabilities