Home | Newsletters | How to Build a Great Career Page, Make Positive Change Possible, Incentives that Work

How to Build a Great Career Page, Make Positive Change Possible, Incentives that Work

As a Christian business leader, you want to accelerate your growth, profit, and impact in the marketplace (and build a better life!). Our goal is to bring you the best tips, tools, and techniques to do just that!

Let’s get started!

By the way, if you enjoy getting this email every week please forward it to a friend and encourage them to subscribe!

Business

5 Must Haves for a Great Career Page

We discussed last week that a great career page is a must have if you want to attract excellent talent to your organization. This week we’ll cover what you’ve got to have on your career site to make it great.

Invitation from the Boss

Leaders of large organizations can get out of touch pretty quickly and appear unapproachable to staff and candidates alike. To beat this, put a video at the top of your career page from the big boss letting all the applicants know how excited he/she is that they are considering your organization as a place to build their career. Tell all about how your organization values their people and helps them create better lives for themselves and their families. You do all of that, right?

Testimonials from Real Employees

Have a few of your A+ players record videos telling candidates about why they choose your organization and why they plan to build their careers with you.

Remember, videos are way better than text. If you want to really step it up a notch, have your testimonial givers provide their contact information and invite potential candidates to reach out to them to get the real scoop on your workplace. Be sure to include testimonials from new hires and veterans. You’ll be hiring at all levels and need to appeal to applicants with differing levels of experience. Deloitte Netherlands does a great job of this with their “job ambassadors.”

Highlight Your Culture

Culture fit should count for at least 50% of your interview process. Think about the last few people you had to fire. Was it a skills issue or a character issue? Culture matters and screening out bad fits starts with your career page. Check out how Zappos puts culture at the forefront of their hiring process while partnering with jobvite.com to manage their hiring process.

Make it Mobile

The great majority of job searches are begun on mobile devices and that trend will only continue. Make sure your career page is mobile friendly and that getting started in your interview process can be accomplished on a mobile device.

Keep in Touch

Make sure interested candidates can give you their contact information so they can be the first to know when another exciting career opportunity opens up. Don’t lose great people who can’t find a fit on their first interaction with your company.

Lastly, make sure you have a bulletproof system for follow up. Every candidate deserves the respect and attention that you’d give your top recruits. They might be that top recruit some day and how you treat them is certainly an indication of how you treat all your employees. You can really promote or hinder your employee brand with how you care for all of your recruits!

Is this a lot of work? Yes. But attracting and hiring great people is the only way to build a great organization. Put in the work and the dividends will pay off for years to come.

Health!

At Some Point, You’ve Got to Eat the Broccoli

Great article at Farnham Street about the work required to make any positive change in your life. The fact is that bad habits come easy and good habits are brutal to develop. To succeed, you eventually must eat the broccoli, do the work, etc.

Here are a couple tips to making positive change possible.

Make it the smallest change possible. I am constantly working to improve my diet. With our 4th kid here, I have less time than ever to work out. Therefore, a great diet has got to be my #1 habit for positive health. But how can I break through the carb and sugar loving habits that I have developed over my lifetime? I don’t. Don’t focus on the elephant. Focus on a small change. A few years ago I added eating one salad every day to my dietary goals. It was completely doable and did not deprive me of anything, but it crowded out some of the junk.
Focus on the most important change. We are all working with limited willpower and working on too much change at one time will burn us out. We will fail, lose confidence and go back to our old behaviors.

So, pick the very most important change that you need to make. Make the change as small and doable as possible, then make that change a habit before you move on to the next change.

Life, Fun, Whatever!

Getting Incentives Right

Great incentives are:

Simple – Everyone can calculate what their bonus will be without asking.
Immediate – Three months after year end is bad. Monthly is better, weekly is way better.

Same rules go for feedback/reviews.

Nucor based incentives on weekly production. FedEx got their incentives right when they calculated pay per shift rather than per hour. Suddenly, the entire team had the same goal. Get the work done so we can go home.

How can you simplify your rewards?