The reading level for this article is All Levels
Young and naïve, I had no idea that the same moment I decided to start KAS, I opened a company that produces the most valuable resource an organization could ever have and that I could have as a business owner – people.
Product or service aside, a firm lives and dies by its the people. If the product of a company isn’t competitive, the people can always tweak it and make it better.
Put 5 smart, capable people in a desert and they’ll build a castle. Put 4 smart and 1 incapable, you get 4 frustrated people.
Society and technology have relentlessly tried for centuries to take people out of the equation. They have failed for centuries. People have tried to outsource most of a company to a foreign country and the greed gets them in the long run.
People are a necessary evil (if you want to take the cynical view and call them “evil”) and whoever has the best people wins.
When it comes time to recruit, some companies know this and take the proper, advantageous steps in order to put themselves in the driver’s seat.
These are the same companies that get away with asking the tough questions. These are the companies that don’t have to give a bit of leverage to the person interviewing with the company. They don’t chase. People chase them.
The reason Google is able to ask interviewees outlandish such as, “What are the number of sandwiches eaten in China annually?” is because they have a good reputation, a good image and combine the two with a good corporate atmosphere and above market compensation.
Then, there is the association factor. Not many companies think about this. People want to feel important. When a sports team wins the Super Bowl, it’s, “Our Saints.” The people who live in the city like to think that they are part of something important.
Another example could be given relating to any particular non-work social function.
Someone who works at Google is going to be much more confident upon being introduced to strangers because they, when asked who they work for, get to associate themselves with the Google name.
Now, automatically, the inquiring party assumes that the Google employee is a smart, talented and hard working person.
How does one recruit internally like Google? Getting good people is doable.
A company must start with their website and their image. Your website is your first impression and your first line of defense. Before they even get to an office, applicants will have either tilted the odds in the company’s favor or intuited whether they have the ability to control the interview process.
Therefore, it is imperative that a company has a nice website and the interviewer wears not only a professional outfit but a professional demeanor. People in the company’s office should look presentable.
Depending on which study you cite, human being makes a decision on a visual image and determines whether it is pleasing within somewhere between 3 – 5 seconds.
Therefore, when an applicant visits your website, they may immediately associate a poorly written and poorly designed homepage with a bad company that is filled with uninteresting people. Even in the thinnest of job markets, an applicant who believes your company’s jobs to be in low demand automatically walks into the interview with upper hand.
Even in passing, you can ask any psychologist what the biggest for of persuasion is and they will tell you that aesthetics is the biggest form of persuasion.
And this quotidian phenomenon is not limited to fashion magazines and makeup ads: Take a look at the number of CEOs who are bald compared with the percentage of the U.S. population who is bald. The numbers don’t quite add up. Whether they want to or not, human beings associate appearance with influence.
Cleaning up your company’s image to recruit is imperative.
