When people are hired and on-boarded by an organization that they are philosophically aligned with, and they are hired into roles that complement their strengths and talents, they perform—and they perform well.

Taking a Conscious Approach to Hiring

Feb. 22, 2016
Hiring in the 21st Century demands an intelligent, connected system that selects the right candidate for the right reason.

Many companies, from multinational mega-corporations to neighborhood markets, continue to follow obsolete hiring practices, disproven techniques based on out-of-date principles, adhering to policies that are established and customary. But, these are methods that have been shown to lead to high turnover, stagnant engagement by the staff, and even to poor financial performances. It seems that drones are staffing some HR offices; they hire workers and staff in a completely automatic, unconscious manner. Solving the hiring problems of the 21st Century calls for a spirited, connected system that simplifies the task of selecting the right candidate. It requires a conscious hiring process.

The premise here is that conscious hiring is the lynchpin to workforce optimization and engagement and employee retention, as well as an overall boost to customer service efforts. Hiring consciously means selecting people with a sense of awareness about the roles they are meant to fill, the purpose and outcomes required to successfully validate that roles’ existence, and its cost to the organization. It also describes a sense of mindfulness about who the right type of person is for a particular role. With a conscious hiring mindset, all of these parameters are defined at the beginning of the search. It means the one doing the hiring makes keen decisions that are geared toward the organization’s strategic needs over and above the keywords listed on the resume, and under the pressure to fill a job quickly.

When people are hired and on-boarded by an organization that they are philosophically aligned with, and they are hired into roles that complement their strengths and talents, they perform—and they perform well. When you open your ‘hiring minds’ and take a conscious approach in you’re ‘people on-boarding methods, you streamline your operation: you optimize the workforce, maximize employee retention and engagement, and begin to provide more complete customer service.

Workforce Optimization — When you approach hiring the way you approach improving your golf or tennis game, or running other individual effort, it only makes sense to hire people who will raise the standard for competition, and make everyone better in the process. High performers focus on doing the right things and achieving specific results. Depending upon their role and interests, they focus on making improvements to products and the business at large. An optimized workforce means that the right people are focused on the right things. The right things may be determined as increased sales, operational efficiency, innovation, customer experience or sustainability, as these are the pillars of any organization that has demonstrated long-term success.

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