How to Find the Best Talent to Grow Your Business E-Book

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 164

Beschreibung

This book is the ultimate go-to hiring resource for business leaders, managers and HR professionals. Filled with smart, strategic real-world advice, Julie lays out straight-forward and easy-to-follow steps to find theright candidate for your organization- every time!
Introduction from the author:

If you’re committed to finding the best talent to grow your business, then you’ve come to the right place—I’ve written this book for you!

You may be a passionate business owner, senior executive or hiring manager, or perhaps you work in HR and want to hone your recruitment expertise. No matter what brought you here, I can promise that on the following pages, you’ll find some of the best tips, trends, and insights I have accumulated over the past two decades.

My team and I have weathered many storms over the years, from economic downturns to global crises like the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Through every ebb and flow, values such as trust, integrity and relationship-building have remained at the core of all my recruitment successes. What you’ll get from this book is intel presented through the lens of these fundamental principles.

For several years now, I’ve been sharing the best of what I know on my company’s blog at www.blueskypersonnel.com. Many clients have told me since then just how much value they’ve gained from this content.

So, I’ve meticulously scoured this collection of content and pulled from it what I feel is both timely and timeless in recruitment—all of it with the goal of exponentially growing your business by finding the best talent to hire from the marketplace.

As such, this book is designed for you to easily read it from cover to cover in one sitting. But if you choose, you can also use it as a quick reference guide, jumping directly to a specific topic of interest when needed.

Either way, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m more passionate about recruitment than ever, and I hope the time-tested recruitment strategies contained in this book will serve you well for many years to come.

Cheers to your hiring success!

Best, Julie

Leseprobe

How to Find the Best Talent to Grow Your Business

Copyright © Julie Labrie, BlueSky Personnel Solutions 2022

Published by BlueSky Personnel Solutions

7111 Syntex Drive, 3rd Floor

Mississauga, ON Canada L5N 8C3

[phone] | [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be made through the publisher. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This book is not intended as a substitute for professional recruitment consulting services. The information provided in this book is based on the author’s experiences and opinions. The author and publisher specifically disclaim responsibility for any adverse consequences which may result from the use of the information contained herein.

Cataloguing and publication information is available from the Library and Archives Canada

Issued in print and electronic formats

ISBN: 978-1-7387148-2-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-7387148-0-3 (Softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-7387148-1-0 (Electronic book)

Authored by: Julie Labrie

Edited by: Keka DasGupta

Cover design by: Dendrite Park, Inc.

Cover and author images by: Donna Santos Studio

Hair and make-up by: Sigi Bloomberg

Styling by: Shona Cruz

www.blueskypersonnel.com

Praise for How to Find the Best Talent to Grow Your Business

“Whether you are a seasoned manager or new to recruiting, Julie’s advice is invaluable’ and totally on point’, particularly in this challenging recruiting market. This book is a must read for anyone involved in hiring.”

– Judith Puttock, President, The Puttock Group

“Following the advice in this book with save you time and money in hiring. That isn’t the real reason to pick it up. The skills and advice that Julie shares are targeted to landing consistent good hires who thrive in your culture, delivery results, and elevate the whole team. Learn how to identify the true achiever from the lucky salesperson, and distinguish between those who sound good verses those who really are stars.”

– Tracey Scanlon, General Manager, Canada, Hubert

“This book offers straight-forward, real world advice for HR professionals, managers, and business owners alike. Julie’s practical recommendations are easy to implement, and they will make a big difference in your hiring efforts.”

– Manuelita Cherizard, Chief Human Resources Officer

“This is the perfect handbook for any manager who wants to succeed in their recruitment by hiring dedicated employees. A top expert in her field, Julie Labrie’s passion shines through in this collection of human-centered recruitment advice that factors in the needs of the candidate, the manager, and the recruiter. This book is a “must”!

– Marie-Claude Jobin, Senior Director, Training

“Anyone needing advice and guidance with recruitment will find this book an excellent reference. Very well done, Julie.”

– Brian Brown, Chief Executive Officer, School Board’s Co-operative Inc. (SBCI)

“Julie’s recruitment skills are a congenital gift. She commits herself to making sure that both sides, recruiters and employers, will be happy with her placements. She is a cupid of the employment matchmaking world!”

– Nadine Chang, CPA, Professional Liability Plan Inc.

“Julie has been able to capture the true essence of How to Find the Best Talent to Grow your Business. As a recruiter myself that has worked with Julie in the past, I found this book to be both educating and insightful. This book can benefit not only business leaders and managers but recruiters and HR professionals as well.”

– Julie Atkinson, Recruitment Consultant

“Not many people can write a book that makes the recruitment process look easy! But that’s exactly what Julie Labrie has done in this down-to-earth, practical, game-changing message. This isn’t just another book about the hiring process and, believe me, in my over 30 years in Human Resources and Life Coaching, I have read too many to count. This book will help you to reframe even the smallest decisions you make to ensure the right hire and retention that proves to be a win-win for both parties. As someone who had learned the hard way ‘back when’ about the power of good and bad choices, the principles in this book really resonate with me. For those of you who are ready to work with a company with the best leadership, outstanding ethics and practices, solid experience, and expertise – Julie and BlueSky Personnel will help you find the best talent to grow your business!”

– Pat Mussieux, Business Coach, Speaker, Author, TV Host

“A must-read for anyone in the recruitment business. This book is concise, easy to read, and laid out clearly for any recruitment situation you may encounter. Julie Labrie is a true professional - the proof is in how she has made such a huge success of BlueSky Personnel Solutions. Congratulations Julie!”

– Beverly McMaster, Entrepreneur

For: My wonderful family—my husband Steven,

and my two daughters Stéphanie and Julianna.

For every time you’ve heard me say:

I don’t have time right now

I have to finish this

I can’t, I’m too busy

Go ahead, I will catch up with you

(Even rushing back

to the hotel room to do a media interview

during our Disney family vacation!)

Thank you for your patience,

support and enduring encouragement.

I am the recruiter I am today because of you.

Table of Contents

About the Author

Introduction

SECTION 1: RECRUITMENT BEST PRACTICES

How Do You Find a Good Recruiter?

How Honest Should You Be with Your Recruitment Agency?

Should You Keep Working with a Recruiter Who Couldn’t Fill a Position for You?

How Many Candidates Should a Recruiter Send to You?

Getting Candidates with Multiple Offers to Choose You

Six Steps to Remotely Hiring New Staff Right Now

Are You Including These Three New, Must-Ask Questions in Your Candidate Interviews?

The Easiest Way to Lose Your Best Candidate

SECTION 2: FINDING THE RIGHT FIT

Finding the Right Fit: Five Tips for Successful Hiring

Going Beyond the Job Description to Find the Best Fit

How to Find and Recruit People Who Love Their Work

Where Are All the Most-Passionate Job Candidates?

Ambitious Versus Passionate New Hires: Which Is Better?

Finding the WOW Factor in Customer Service Candidates

How to Find Innovators for Your Organization

How to Hire Lucky Salespeople (and Make Sure They Stay Lucky!)

Assessing Conversational Competence for Sales Positions

Are You Hiring Candidates with Soft Skills?

How to Deal with Hiring Remorse

SECTION 3: WINNING INTERVIEW PROCESSES

Are You Objective During the Interview Process?

Structured or Unstructured Interviews: What Is More Effective?

Derailing the Script: How to Get Real Answers from Candidates

Seven Telling Interview Questions

These Questions Get Real Answers from Job Candidates

How to Decode Body Language

Beware the “Presenter’s Paradox”: Why You May Be Passing on Your Best Candidate

Assess Emotional Intelligence to Weed Out “Bad People Managers”

Three Telltale Signs of Fake References

SECTION 4: TIPS FOR HIRING BILINGUAL CANDIDATES

The Economic Potential with Just One Bilingual Hire

Beware: The $100K Mistake in Bilingual/French Hiring

How to Secure Bilingual Talent (and Why They Are So Hard to Find!)

How Bilingual Is That Job Candidate Really? Use This Test to Find Out.

Bilingual Candidates: Casual Knowledge Versus Full Bilingual Capabilities

SECTION 5: TEAM-BUILDING AND LEADERSHIP

The Superpower of a Team

What Astronauts Can Teach Us About Hiring

How Humble Leadership Impacts Sales

Creating a Culture of Innovation and Risk

SECTION 6: EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT AND PRODUCTIVITY

Why Employee Engagement Is Not About the Workplace

Does Time Off Impact Business Productivity?

Measuring Vacation Performance

Turn Overwhelmed Employees Into Inspired Employees

How to Minimize Attention Deficits in an “Always-On” Work World

Has the Pandemic Killed Passion in the Workplace?

How to Make Employees More Accountable

Ten Ways to Maximize Employee Performance

SECTION 7: BEST PRACTICES IN HR PROCESSES

How to Deliver Bad News to Employees

How to Minimize Risk When Firing an Employee

How to Effectively Onboard New Team Members Remotely

SECTION 8: BUSINESS-BUILDING

Top Five Reasons Your Employees Are Leaving

You Can Fill a Vacant Position, or You Can Solve a Business Problem

How Part-Time Hires Can Help Expand Your Business

Succession Planning Tips for Business

Conclusion

About the Author

Meet Julie Labrie, One of the World Staffing Awards’Top 100 Staffing Leaders to Watch in 2022

Julie is the president and owner of one of Canada’s top Bilingual/French recruitment firms, BlueSky Personnel Solutions. For over twenty years, her company has helped connect people to their dream jobs and helped companies build dream teams to grow their businesses.

Julie is not only a successful entrepreneur, she is also a trusted media commentator, offering talent-management and career advice to Canadians across outlets such as: CTV, CBC, Global News, NewsTalk 1010, Radio-Canada, HR Reporter, Recruiting Daily, and more. She is also a columnist and resident-recruitment expert for the Globe and Mail.

In 2019, TopRecruiter named Julie as the country’s number three recruiter and recognized her company as Toronto’s number one recruitment agency. Corporate Vision Magazine has also awarded BlueSky Personnel Solutions the title of Canada’s Best Full-Serve Bilingual/French Employment Agency in their Small Business Awards. Most recently, The World Staffing Awards named Julie among their Top 100 Staffing Leaders to Watch in 2022, ranking her among the top HR thought leaders from around the world.

Julie grew up with humble beginnings in a French-speaking community in Quebec City, Canada. She always dreamt of becoming fully bilingual in English and French. As a student, she left the familiarity and safety of her childhood home and moved 500 miles away to the “big city” of Toronto without fluent English.

She persevered, and as she continued mastering her English skills after university, she fell into the recruitment industry, where she quickly realized that she had found her calling. Soon enough, Julie became the owner of her own boutique recruitment firm, BlueSky Personnel Solutions. The rest, as they say, is history!

Introduction

If you’re committed to finding the best talent to grow your business, then you’ve come to the right place—I’ve written this book for you!

You may be a passionate business owner, senior executive or hiring manager, or perhaps you work in HR and want to hone your recruitment expertise. No matter what brought you here, I can promise that on the following pages, you’ll find some of the best tips, trends, and insights I have accumulated over the past two decades.

My team and I have weathered many storms over the years, from economic downturns to global crises like the SARS outbreak of 2003, the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and, of course, the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Through every ebb and flow, values such as trust, integrity and relationship-building have remained at the core of all my recruitment successes. What you’ll get from this book is intel presented through the lens of these fundamental principles.

For several years now, I’ve been sharing the best of what I know on my company’s blog at www.blueskypersonnel.com. Many clients have told me since then just how much value they’ve gained from this content.

So, I’ve meticulously scoured this collection of content and pulled from it what I feel is both timely and timeless in recruitment—all of it with the goal of exponentially growing your business by finding the best talent to hire from the marketplace.

As such, this book is designed for you to easily read it from cover to cover in one sitting. But if you choose, you can also use it as a quick reference guide, jumping directly to a specific topic of interest when needed.

Either way, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it. I’m more passionate about recruitment than ever, and I hope the time-tested recruitment strategies contained in this book will serve you well for many years to come.

Cheers to your hiring success!

Best,

Julie

SECTION 1________

RECRUITMENT BEST PRACTICES

1

How Do You Find a Good Recruiter?

Afew years back, a Globe and Mail reader asked me:

“How does one find a good recruiter? I need one! What can a recruiter do for you? What can you expect? How do you choose someone? How would the relationship proceed? How much does it cost? What information do you need to know before you go searching?”

I still get asked these questions from time to time, and the fact remains: A recruiter can offer both job seekers and employers tremendous value.

Companies with limited HR support can use a recruiter as an extension of their HR departments. Creating a partnership with a good recruiter will enhance human resources support for any business’ internal employees. Job seekers, too, should use recruitment agencies as tools to help them access companies that may not publicly advertise their job openings.

Here’s what I shared in the Globe and Mail1 in terms of benefits specifically for employers. This content is as relevant today as it was when it was originally published.

* * * * *

The following are tips to find a good recruiter and maximize the value you get out of them:

First of all, let’s consider the question: Why use a recruiter? There are two very valuable benefits that recruiters offer: 1) They can tap into talent that companies cannot access to (e.g., approaching workers who are currently employed, scoping out the competition, etc.). 2) They can save a company considerable time on the search and pre-screening process. By leveraging the recruiter’s ability to “find a needle in a haystack,” executives can focus on what they do best.

When it comes to finding a good recruiter, here are some considerations:

Ask recruiters where their expertise lies. It’s best to hire a recruiter whose focus complements your hiring needs.In recruitment, success is more closely tied to quality than quantity. Beyond the years of experience or the size of a firm, successful placements are key. (Even if a recruiter filled 150 positions in a short time, if many ended up tanking, their work can’t be deemed a success.)How responsive is the recruitment firm? Will your recruiter prioritize you? Ask if they offer service-level commitments, such as timely responses to correspondenceAlso ask whether the recruiter will support you in finding a replacement should their original hire fail.

Recruiters should really operate as an extension of your HR department. They will conduct all of the pre-screening, liaise with short-listed candidates, schedule interviews, check references, assist with negotiations and so forth.

In terms of remuneration, outside of some executive search firms with retainer fees, most recruiters operate on contingency, meaning the recruiter essentially works for you for free until they have successfully filled the position for you. Once a candidate is hired, a fee is paid to the recruiter based on a pre-negotiated percentage of the new employee’s salary.

If you work exclusively with one recruiter (as you generally would with a doctor, dentist, or real estate agent), you are more likely to get their full attention, effort, and service. In addition, the more open you are in sharing your company’s culture and the nuances of your workplace, the greater chance your recruiter will find the best candidate for your team.

The best hires are found when the company and recruiter commit to working together as if they were on a joint venture.

2

How Honest Should You Be with Your Recruitment Agency?

After twenty years in this industry, the short answer, in our humble opinion is: 100%.

When Kelly McDavid, Director of HR at Miele Canada, first connected with us, she explained that her efforts to achieve complete transparency with the recruitment agencies she hired in the past were futile.

Kelly would sit down with her external recruitment partners, sometimes for over an hour, so they could better understand her business and hiring needs. Still, at the end of the day, she felt like they weren’t listening and didn’t get what she wanted.

Kelly has been working with BlueSky Personnel Solutions for over fourteen years now. She recently sat down with us over Zoom to share her experiences and insights from a client perspective.

“I am picky, and we are picky,” said Kelly in the interview she did with us. “We are a high-end company—a high-end brand, and we were looking for people who were professional and could represent the brand the way it was intended to be represented.”

Too often, she felt like she was being sent “warm bodies” just for the sake of it.

In contrast, when Kelly became a client of BlueSky Personnel Solutions, she said what stood out for her was our integrity and the fact that we listened to what her company needed.

“You were true to your word, you listened to what I needed, and if you didn’t have somebody to send me, you wouldn’t just send me anybody,” Kelly said. “You’d tell me straight up that ‘we’re having trouble with this one and it might take a little more time,’ and I was very appreciative of that because I didn’t want to waste my time interviewing people that I knew weren’t the right people.”

“If you want to work with a professional business partner, who truly listens to what you need and works with you every step of the way until you find the right person, then you need to work with BlueSky Personnel Solutions.”– Kelly McDavid, Director of HR, Miele Canada

And therein lies what we believe is the secret to success in recruitment: 100% honesty from both sides (agency and client) in the spirit of a true partnership. We believe this involves trust, collaboration, and a long-game approach.

In the interview with Kelly, I said, “I must admit that, personally, it is truly important for me to make sure that I only send my clients what they are asking for.” This philosophy is reflected by our whole team too. That is our brand promise. “I’ve never been interested in just making a quick placement and walking away. I’ve always been in this for the long-term. Quite frankly, this is important for me as a person. That’s how I am in life anyway!”

Cultivating authentic, trusting, long-term relationships with our clients rooted in honesty and integrity—this is what has defined BlueSky Personnel Solutions’ success over the years. And we wear this reputation as our badge of honour. 

3

Should You Keep Working with a Recruiter Who Couldn’t Fill a Position for You?

As a recruiter, this is a very tough position to be in. You’ve done everything you possibly can to find the right talent for your client without success. Sometimes you can do everything correctly, but a star candidate still opts to decline your client’s offer in favour of a competitor’s. At other times, the right talent eludes you altogether. You just can’t find them. It happens.

For some people in our industry, panic sets in during these moments. They opt to continue sending their clients candidates, even if they aren’t a good fit, to fulfill their obligations. We all have a natural instinct to please others. However, where many in the recruitment field zig, we choose to zag.

We have always held the philosophy that we will exhaust all options while keeping our clients in the loop. If we can’t ultimately find the right talent for them, we will be open and honest and tell our clients as much. We don’t want to waste their time or the candidates’ time, and we also don’t want to waste our own time!