THE FLOW TO HANDLE APPLICATIONS

Is there anyone who has ever experienced that you get a lot of applications when you place a hiring ad? I just want to show you a very effective flow that you can use in case you have a lot of applicants.

You place an ad in a newspaper or on the internet. Let's say you have 100 applicants. That means you either have a lot of paper or a lot of emails and it can take quite some time to just read through them.

There is the famous story about the guy who had a lot of applications and he took half of them and threw them in the waste basket. His assistant said “Hey, you are throwing all these applications away.”

He replied “Yeah, but I don't care because I don't want to hire people with bad luck.” You can actually do it a little bit differently. To read through everything takes a lot of time and it doesn’t give you much. So, what do you do?

SCARY LETTER

What we do is write something we call a Scary Letter; it could be an e-mail or a letter, and we tell the applicant how tough the job is, we also include the amount of pay they can expect to get for the job.

Sometimes there are people who might be fairly productive but they expect a fairly high salary, maybe a lot more than you are willing to pay and it is SO useless to keep a candidate all the way to the end to only find out in the final negotiation that you cannot agree on the pay. So, you tell them already here what pay they are looking at – in case there is a limit, if you are willing to pay a LOT don't mention money here.

This letter basically ends with one question – are you still interested in this job? We will give you 24 hours or 48 hours to answer this letter and if you don't answer we consider it to be “No.”

From experience about 50% say “Yes” and the other 50% say “No” or they don't answer. Now you know that every candidate is aware of the real job and what pay you are talking about. Now you can start the process.

THE HIRING CYCLE

I have spent six years working with programmers and we now have a beautifully polished internet machine. It works smoothly, handles all of your recruitment problems and can also be used for in house evaluating of existing personnel. If you use the Performia system the hiring cycle is simple because then you send these 50 people a production interview from the system and you tell them “You have 48 hours to answer.”

After 48 hours you can go in and look at the answers, we compare productivity and normally we would say that 25 have an okay productivity. So these 25 now get sent a test. It could be a Personality test, IQ test, whatever test is necessary, and they get another 48 hours to answer.

When these results come back you are normally down to around 7 or 8 people and at this point you schedule them for a personal interview and after that select the person you want to hire. From getting the applicants all the way to hiring can be done in 10 days, and using this method you keep in communication with every single candidate.

METHODS OF OTHER COMPANIES

Instead of what many companies do: they spend a lot of time reading these applications then they select 15 of these, do 15 interviews, schedule another interview (maybe with 5 people), then schedule another interview with maybe the last 2 people, then they start doing testing or they may have started doing testing when they had it down to 5 people.

This all takes a long time, they easily go from a month to three or four months. In the worst case when they have decided who they want to hire the person already has another job, he is not there anymore. This is because good productive candidates are not around forever. They are also productive when they are looking for a job, only those people who are not productive wait for months.

IF YOU ARE NOT USING THE PERFORMIA SYSTEM

I pity you.

Okay, you get the ad responses in, hopefully in the ad you asked for them to give you a record of their production, now you can immediately look through the responses and see who has replied with a production record. Select out those people who have and schedule the best for an interview or further testing.

IMPORTANCE IN SPEED OF HIRING

If you decide “I want a new job!” and if you are productive, very soon you will have it. That is why speed is VERY important.

If you are hiring and can decide quickly “Yes we want you!” Whatever method you use, if you feel that this person is perfect, don't wait, hire the person.

NEXT LESSON: THE JOB INTERVIEW