#44- Hire Right the First Time and Reduce Employee Turnover at Your Community
3 Steps to Creating a Compelling Recruiting Message with David Bonney
Constant employee turnover can be one of the most frustrating challenges as a multifamily professional. It becomes extremely difficult to reach occupancy and retention goals when you aren’t fully staffed or worse, when you have the wrong people on your team.
What if you could consistently attract top talent to your property management company?
David Bonney of Hire to Fit coaches businesses, executives, and entrepreneurs on how to do just that. In fact, we have been one of David’s coaching clients for the last two years and have transformed our business, including our hiring process. That’s why I knew he was the perfect guest for today’s episode.
Today David is sharing his three-step method to build a compelling recruiting message. That’s right … the hiring process is a marketing game too! Let’s dive into our conversation.
Watch the mini workshop video or catch the audio below.
Snippets from my conversation with my business coach, David Bonney, of Hire to Fit.
What is the most common hiring mistake you see?
When we think about our family, we won't just bring anybody in, but when it comes to our work family, it seems like the gate is a lot lower and people come in and it can really disrupt things. The one thing that I will always consistently beat the drum on for everyone is the vast majority of hiring managers, they don't actually know who they're looking for. So the most common hiring mistake is not knowing who you're looking for, to begin with.
Getting clear on how do you define what an A-player would be that you would want to hire? Until you define them, you can't actually go out and effectively recruit them and bring them into your hiring funnel. You're definitely not going to be able to recognize if they're sitting right in front of you because you don't have criteria to bump up against.
David’s three-step approach to creating the right recruiting message for your property management company
The first one is to define the IMPACT you want to have. If you have people that are excited about being in the multifamily housing industry and want to have a similar impact as you, your ability to clearly define what that impact is and what that purpose is is really critical.
The example that I use is I would never really be a good team member if Coca-Cola or Pepsi hired me. I'm trying to stop drinking Coca-Cola and Pepsi because I think it's terrible for you and I think it's contributing to a lot of health issues in our country. So I wouldn't have a passion. It’s not the impact I want to have on the world.
So the first question is what is the passion, what are we trying to go build? I want to go find people that have a similar passion. The only way that I can do that is to try to unpack it from my own brain and then recognize if other people have it as well.
People are the most powerful resource a business has, and people are not being tapped into at the level they should be so that they can create impact. And a lot of that is because they're not passionate about what they do or the impact of their work; whether they're with the wrong company or if they're in the wrong industry or if they're just with the wrong team.
The key, as a hiring manager, is to get clear on how I define passion first, so that I can invite people on the journey to go create that impact.
Next you have to define your core values. So often we look at the capabilities or abilities that somebody needs in order to do their role, but just because somebody is proficient at the technical aspect doesn't mean that we're going to work well together. And those core values are really important. Our core values are how we approach the work.
My core values are humble, hungry, and sharp. I just don't work well with people that aren't humble, people that come in with a lot of bravado, boisterous and bragging. They're not bad people; I just don't get them. I don't understand where they're coming from. So subconsciously my trust in them goes down. People that aren't hungry and aren't willing to come in to the office early if we've got some stuff to get done. If I'm coming in at 7:00 and they're coming in at 8:30, I don't trust that we're going to be able to get the work done.
There should be a common thread of beliefs that we have in terms of how we approach our work that increases trust. Like Lencioni says on the Five Dysfunctions of a Team: when we have high trust, that's the foundational point of every high performing and high functioning team out there.
Lastly, define the capabilities needed. This is where you can make your bullet-pointed list of: needs to be proficient in this, needs to be able to do this, needs to be able to do that. Go ahead and get that knocked out. It's important, but I see it as the third most important part because if I can find somebody who is passionate about the work and what we're trying to do, someone who is aligned from a core value perspective, I can teach them a lot of the capabilities that they need to a certain extent. If they're really good on the capability side but we're not aligned on a core value and what we're passionate about? I can't train them on that. I can't teach them that.
So those are your three areas: passion for what we're doing, core values, and capabilities.
Question: The company might have these core values that are posted on the wall. They may or may not be living them. But could the manager themselves with her team create their own set of core values since they're the ones that are going to be working together?
I actually encourage everyone on any team that I've ever led to go out and define their own core values because when you can define your own core values, you are more capable of finding a company that's a great fit for you and identify if your existing company is a great fit for you or not. If they do have core values but they're not living it and they're just words on the wall, then let's just be okay with that. No judgment there. We tried. But if they do have core values up on the wall and they are trying to live them, then it's likely that you're aligned to those and you're a good fit. So you can just take those core values for your team.
Now, if they don't have core values or they're not living them, your ability to go through and understand your own core values for your own satisfaction with the company will also benefit you as you step into leadership positions, because now you'll always be armed with a set of criteria that you can go leverage to build any team with any company that you ever work for. And that's extremely, extremely powerful.
Defining Our Core Values
The unpacking process is extremely important and what we leverage is a proven psychological process where you use the method of, I understand what I do want as soon as I know what I don't want. That's why the don't wants in our life are so powerful and so beautiful—they allow us to get even clearer on what we do want.
>>Tune into the episode to hear David talk through a process of identifying what we don’t want in a team member and infinity mapping to come to your core values.
SPEND THE TIME TO DEFINE YOUR FIT PROFILE
The vast majority of businesses will spend a vast amount of time and money defining their target customer. Let's get clear on that so we can market to them and our message resonates with them so that they end up coming to our front door. It's the same thing, if not even more important, with your recruiting message.
You just can't imagine how much return you'll get on the investment of however much time you spend trying to get this A-player profile, fit profile, whatever you want to call it, getting that dialed in for your business, for your team, for your life.
Common objection: "I don't have time to get clear on that stuff. I just need to find a warm body to fill a role."
The way that I see it, you're going to spend time either way. You're just going to spend a lot more time over a much longer period dealing with the ramifications of you not getting clear on who is the right fit for your team. The teams that actually have the worst alignment issues are the teams that have the most chaos going on.
At a certain point we all make a decision as leaders to say “enough is enough, I can't deal with this anymore. I'm going to put in the extra time and resources to finally nip this in the bud and get this figured out and start to do something differently. And this next person that we bring on board is going to be more aligned with what I'm looking for. Not perfect alignment.”
Now your team members no longer need to be mind readers. If you don't know your boss's core values, you feel like you need to be a mind reader. When I give our people clear criteria, I don't need to worry about whether I’m in a good mood, a bad mood, not around, whatever. As long as you're aligned to these things, as long as you're humble every day and you're coming in hungry and you're attacking our problems and you're being as sharp as you can in attacking those problems, you're good. Everything's fine.
It gives everybody a release to say, "Well, I want to be successful. Now I know how I need to operate on a daily basis to be successful. That is really empowering and I'm really thankful for that."
And as we've talked about, I believe all problems are leadership problems. It's a great conversation to come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to own it. I haven't actually given you the criteria of what I'm looking for and you've had to guess. I'm going to own that. That's not good for you and that hasn't helped you and I'm going to stop that. Now I'm going to help you by giving you this set of criteria and why I'm looking for it and why it's helpful and put you in a position to now choose. If you want to be successful, you can be."