The Working Week 37: Paolo Moscuzza on recruitment & retention
Attracting and retaining good people is a perennial headache for employers, consuming time and resources as well as a considerable amount of emotional energy – particularly if a favoured candidate decides to reject your overtures and go elsewhere.
On the Working Week this week, Wayne talks to Paolo Moscuzza, an occupational psychologist and a Principal Consultant with the Business Psychology practice of UK-based ER Consultants, about the practical steps that organisations and recruiters can take to ensure that candidates chose them rather than someone else.
Among the things that employers often get wrong, Moscuzza says, are dragging the recruitment process out far too long – then wondering why a candidate has gone elsewhere – and burning their bridges by treating candidates as if they are doing them a huge favour by considering them at all.
And that’s before we even get onto the issue of retention – by which we mean rather more than sending your staff on the occasional training course in the name of “professional development”.
So if you feel your recruitment process is less effective than it might be and you retention stats could do with a boost, take 10 minutes out of your working week to listen to ours.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:23 am
I am sorry that the new wave of thinking about work is so slow. 90% of employers are thinking that caging somebody in the office and looking at them working all the time is the best way to motivate people. To me, personally the worst thing is to be constantly monitored and told when I have to wake up and eat lunch. I declined job offers because of the lack of freedom. The normal approach is that I go for a job interview, I talk to them for 30-50 minutes, I am basically hired and then I discover how they will treat me. How much time I will waste on filling in the time sheets so they know how little they can pay me if I devote an hour per week to rest comparing with the week before. I just can’t stand to be told that I am 5 minutes late from lunch when I put extra 30 minutes every evening for free to close all the planned tasks per that day. I just can’t leave work and have something hanging for the following day.
I think the most attractive people to the organization are also the people that demand the biggest flexibility from their environment. The boss thinks that if he’s not overlooking every move, one will not work. Sometimes it’s even phrased: “force yourself to work”. The best in any field are the people who love what they do so why try forcing and caging them?
The story ended up with me working freelance, with my own rates and time schedule. I sometimes work 70 hours per work, but I decide whether I wake up at 10 a.m. or work whole night till 6 a.m. and sleep 4 hours afterwards.
I think most of the employers and still living in the early 20th century and that’s really sad. I also believe that no one should ever be employed. Everyone should have their own brand and set of services. Should raise invoices and negotiate their work per project. That’s a different matter.
The other thing is that it’s not about money but freedom and not wasting the employee’s life with rigid schedule. If there’s work let them work for 13 hours that day and take half of the next day off.
Cheers,
Raf