Elevated HR Solutions: Dare to be different with job postings

So admittedly, I am a total Tony Hsieh worshipper. I am enamoured with his book, "Delivering Happiness", I go to both his sites regularly (DeliveringHappinessBook.com and Zappos.com) and try to read as many of his employee's blogs that I can find. So it's probably not really a surprise to you that I push his book where I can and quote him and his stories regularly, especially when I'm trying to prove to my clients that employee engagement really does lead to higher profits.

If you download the book on your iPod, you will hear Tony actually reading it out loud, but his staff also have been asked to read their emails or passages or thoughts about Zappos intermittenly throughout. One of the excerpts is written and read by their recruitment manager, who prior to joining Zappos was a recruiter and when she joined Zappos she wanted to do anything BUT recruit. That was, until she was given the reigns and recruit in her own way.

When I first started Elevated HR Solutions - I definitely wanted to stay away from recruiting too. I certainly wasn't passionate about it and thought that there were enough of them in Calgary that I didn't need to try and be part of that. However, it always seemed to be something my clients struggled with to do on their own. It was incredibly expensive to get a recruiter to do it for them (typically 15 to 25% of first year salary), they didn't really know how to articulate their cutlure, never mind their job postings and everything was a race for finding talent (taking a bit of time, wasn't really an option). But seeing as I push the necessity of employee engagement in organizations, I realized that it begins with hiring the right people and so...I started recruiting again.

That said - I needed to find a way to get passionate about recruitment and take some risks to fuel that passion. Writing the same old job posting had just gotten old and boring for me. Go to any of the current job sites right now - all the job postings are the same: "Come work for us because our company is great, our leadership is great...yadda yadda yadda." Yawn. I'm bored. There are a few good ones out there though:



Here's a quick and easy piece of advice that isn't really rocket science: your company's culture must be represented in your job ads. It's just that simple. If you want to change your culture, then you need to hire the right people to help you. You need to figure out the culture you want, develop a code, a mantra, a maxim (whatever you want to call it) - and hire to that.

So admittedly, not all clients want to be as out there as my last ad: www.elevatedhr.com/careers.html but I have to say this - I pretty much got the biggest response I have ever gotten from a job posting - and people who weren't even in IT wanted to be in IT because of this ad.

Here are some quotes from emails:

"I'm interested by the tone of the ad on Workopolis and your website. Thanks for the lift to my day" -- Kary

"What a great ad on Workopolis! Creative and foosball – I want to play!" -- Sam

"I was intrigued by your jobs posting, didn't quite understand what you were looking for (i.e. the pulse thing), but again intrigued enough to want to find out more." -- David

It's true - you can't just post an ad and pray that someone applies (I stole that from a conversation I had with Geoff Webb of Radical Recruitment today) because it simply doesn't work that way. You have to build a strategy and if you want a piece of the action when it comes to recruitment sticking to the same old same old doesn't work either. You got to be a little bold and a little bit out there to attract even the talent that IS looking - and then as much as you are talking the talk, you gotta walk the walk in the interview process. A great candidate pool will lead you to not only a great employee, but greater customer service, productivity and last but certainly not least, greater profits.

If you don't believe me - just ask Tony Hsieh what he did to get himself a 1 billion dollar deal with Amazon. He'll say it's the people every time.