Outstanding professionals are continuously in high demand in wineries. What can you do to differentiate your winery to persuade top professionals to accept a role with you?
What is your approach to candidates? How are you presenting the opportunity? Are you recruiting for a senior level professional and spending only a few hundred dollars posting an ad? This is not recruiting. Rather it is staffing, anticipating the best candidate will respond to your ad. Recruiting is an active rather than a passive process. Top notch professionals want to be pursued and they typically do not look at or respond to ads. Are you actively seeking out those professionals? Those professionals want to know all correspondence with you is completely confidential; we have a small community and do not want others to know they are considering a change unless they have actively stated their goal.
Have you prepared a detailed job description? This is your roadmap and guides you in the correct direction for the recruiting process. The job description should have clearly described 90 day, 180 day, and first year matrixes so the employee knows and understands what is being required of them to be successful. Is the position description focusing more on activities and tactical goals than on detailing all of the knowledge, skills, abilities and personal and cultural characteristics that an employee will need to be successful in the role? A well rounded job description provides clarity around the needs of the job for both the internal team and external job seekers.
Once you are on the “hunt”, how do you present the opening? Do you emphases the benefits, the challenges, and/or the rewards of the role? Why should they join forces with your winery? Is the prospective candidate meeting with current employees and hearing directly from them why they enjoy working at the company? The reasons to join your winery should be driven by the following motivators:
- Impact – the chance to make a difference
- Influence – the power to persuade
- Results – the chance to build value for the Company
- Teamwork – world class managers and professionals to learn from
- Respect – the chance to be heard
- Growth potential – scalability of the enterprise
- Personal wealth – should be the last motivator
If you are articulating the above factors, you have the best candidate accepting an offer.
Do you incorporate Behavioral Data into your screening process? The hiring manager may receive numerous applications for the role they seek to fill. Using a quick and practical assessment to measure a candidate’s behavioral assets provides additional data points to the decision making process. This helps ensure the managers are not passing over the best candidates and continuing to interview candidates who do not “fit” well into the company. The assessment tool should also provide behavior-based questions in assisting the hiring managers, especially decision makers in the company who might conduct only 15 or 20 interviews in a given year. Providing the interviewer with behavioral-based questions increase their ability to conduct effective interviews and help all members of the interviewing team develop structured behavioral interview questions to determine job and culture fit with greater accuracy. Additionally, understanding a Candidate’s motivating needs is critical to a Candidate accepting an offer since an offer that resonates with the Candidate’s innate motivating needs and drives will be appealing. Companies that do not align an offer with the behavioral profile of the person, risk losing a strong candidate.
The adage “hire slow, fire fast” has never been truer. However, do not be so cautious, taking excessive time, as A+ Professionals are likely to be receiving multiple offers. Are you moving the referencing process forward timely, as well as various background checks? Once you have an enthusiastic Candidate, it is imperative to maintain that enthusiasm.
An inappropriate hire is not just bad for business, it can be very costly. Factor in productivity loss, morale implications, turnover and recruiting costs and the price tag starts to skyrocket. Fortunately, companies can prevent the costs associated with poor hiring decisions by recognizing the challenges at key steps of the talent acquisition process.
Once the hiring process has culminated in a great new hire, managers must embark on getting that individual embedded in the culture and productive as quickly as possible. A common misstep is when managers do not continue to leverage the data and insight collected thus far to customize the new employee’s onboarding plan and learning objectives. This unnecessarily puts at risk the employee’s success potential and job satisfaction.
Should your company have questions regarding recruiting top Candidates and/or profile-driven workforce solutions, please contact Norm Mitroff at Mitroff Consulting & Associates. We can be reached at: [(707) 963-8410. Our website: is www.normanmitroff.com
Mitroff Consulting & Associates is the premier provider of executive human capital solutions. We are a highly recognized, retained executive search and management consulting firm with a proven ability to identify and deliver superior leaders across a variety of industries. Whether large or small, public or private, global or local, every company deserves and requires an effective leadership team. Identifying the right leader for the right position at the right time is a complex challenge best met with the assistance of a search firm that has a proven track record of success.
Founded in 1997 and privately owned, Mitroff Consulting & Associates is one of the nation's leading boutique executive search consulting firms. We have unrivalled access to leading candidates from middle-management to the most senior executives across the country. Our clients span a wide range of industries, from the world's largest companies to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurial start-ups.
by Norman Mitroff, Mitroff Consulting
Mitroff Consulting’s Mission is to deliver the highest level of client service attainable in retained executive search. First and foremost, we are specialists in search, so we purposefully do not limit our practice to a narrow industry focus. As a boutique firm, we can minimize “blockage” issues. That is, because our work spans many industries, fewer companies in any given industry will be off-limits to us.