The Perfect Employer

A ‘workers utopia’ – NOT

As a fairly decent employer most of the past fifty years, I can also sure identify my failings along that road. Statistically a handful of the hundreds of people that have worked for me (I’d rather say worked ‘with’ me) were wrong from get-go but I reckon I did well to retain almost everyone I valued, and most of the others. Retention is everything – the average loss period on any new hire is three months until they are useful.

Of late I’m incredulous at how same-same the employment adverts are, following the same format almost every time. Every hirer is an exemplary beacon of righteous wholesomeness. An average of fifteen bullet points of required skills and virtue, which no human applicant has a hope of matching, following by eight ’desirable’ wishes, and several ‘must haves’ – like a driver’s licence or a formal trade qualification. Mostly in our creative arts and audio visual technical lines of work, a formal qualification is not common.

I keep hearing the same things: ‘I applied and didn’t hear anything’ or ’they hired someone who doesn’t match the list’. We’re in a very small industry here, consider by example the professional audio side buys around ten billion US dollars worth of stuff in a year, while the rest of the planet eats 2.5 times that much in potato crisps. Everyone knows someone, so think about how you recruit.

How about ditching the bullet points, and writing a brief intro from the heart of your business about who you are and what you are looking to achieve? Like, ‘We’re a regional theatre in ‘xxxx’, with a historical façade (and maybe also a ghost called Shirley), in a wonderful town of 40,000 people. We need a professional theatre tech who knows the basics of our system which features ‘xxxx’ and ‘yyyy’. We have eight full-time staff and a pool of casuals, the tech we want is someone who can engage with our community, hirers, our people, and embrace our culture. It’s a full-time gig, and we will pay what we can afford for the right person. Everyone who applies will get a phone call. Write us a letter about why this is you!’

That’d do it, honestly! The ‘get a phone call’ part is the secret sauce. You shouldn’t ever go on an internet date without first talking to the potential suitor, because chances are the wonderfully crafted profile and notes were written by a robot – or a smooth cousin. The person answering the phone may not have the cadence or the grammar to actually match the applicant. That applies with job seekers too, and a new hire could be a very expensive divorce if you mess up. Call every applicant and say, ‘hi, just a quick call to acknowledge your application!’ Then wait until they say something. Like, silence is a wonderful tool! Listen, think, respond, and then advise you will not call back if they are unsuccessful but you sure will email them the minute you have decided. It may have become a valuable discussion. They may have indicated a salary expectation. They may know – possible WILL know – someone you know.

A phone call EARLY does great things for your reputation. The applicant knows they got through, they know NOT to expect a follow up call unless they are winning. They trust what you said, that you’ll let them know by email what happened.

And from that you’ve branded your place as a good employer, one that respects its workers. They talk. I hear them, we all know what we think we know. There’s a Glassdoor review stream spanning at least a decade about a horrible, nasty, vile integration firm that still gets applicants as it churns perfectly good people. Some employers are sociopathic.

But the applicants are NOT from the existing experienced pool of workers we all know, they are always new to our industry. Because we all talk.

Fast forward to the offer and contract phase. I’ve read some recent multinational job contracts on behalf of friends (or my kids), and they usually run to ten or more pages of fine print. Some of them, more than half, contain unenforceable non-compete clauses which may seek to limit you working for a competitor in a similar role, and could push the timeframe well beyond the reasonable six months. One sales rep contract I just reviewed had ’salary’, ‘car allowance’, and ‘commission’ where the commission was a fixed amount, with no definition as to how it was awarded. The inference I drew was that the sales manager would pull a sales number out of thin air and you’d go nuts trying to bust it. Then they would probably whack forty percent on the following year, depending whether they liked you.

That kind of trap is straight away a red flag. A device to play you.

Most ’thinking’ progressive employers talk about how they advertised a job and the eventual winner started in a different role, or an ‘adjusted’ role. Where promotion from within meant alterations to a team, and saved all that time and money on induction and training. Your team usually have strengths and weaknesses and if asked could illuminate opportunity to change their role, or those around them, and maybe that improves all those tangibles, like efficiency, productivity (they are different), morale, profitability and reputation. And it came from within, from the thinking mind of someone who may be hiding in plain view.

(The downside is you may get some crazy ideas that you have to rebuff gently to maintain motivation, and that requires mental energy).

We live and work in an imperfect world of eight billion different humans all of whom cannot hit fifteen bullet points with any degree of accuracy, or at all, and yet almost always have something to offer. Being an employer was by far the hardest thing I ever did at work. I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ it, because it means so much to the people whose lives you co-opt for most of their waking hours across their varied lives. You really are responsible to them, moreso than they are to you.