Hopefully, before you read this, you will have read posts 1 to 5 on Performance Management for Great Customer Service. They’re all based on my own experiences and those of people that I have worked with, over the past thirty years, to try and create great customer service through getting the best out of your people. This one’s about recruitment. Before you switch off because you, maybe, think that recruitment doesn’t have anything to do with you, I encourage you to read on, because what I have to say might help!
If you work for a company where the front line ‘outsources’ recruitment to HR or to a specialised recruitment team, I encourage you, as a front-line manager, to push to be involved in recruiting your new team members yourself. In my opinion, recruiting members of your own team is one of the most important activities you will take part in as a team manager. I was once sent on a brilliant two-day interviewing skills course in my days on the railway, back in the early 1990’s when we were still British Rail. I came back from the course all fired up and ready to get involved in interviewing new front-line people for my team and others. Nothing happened. After a few weeks I went and asked one of my managers if I could be involved in the next round of interviews for new people. He told me that he didn’t think it was appropriate. Being the rebel that I was, I asked him why it had been appropriate to send me on a course to learn how to do something that it wasn’t appropriate for me to do. Eventually, he backed down and said that I could ‘sit in’ on the next round of interviews that he was conducting. For the first time, I realised why the standard of people who were being hired was so low. My manager admitted to me that ‘as long as the people looked reasonably presentable’ he would hire them, based on the assumption that my colleagues and I would ‘be able to make something out of them’ once we had them on our teams.
Eventually, I became part of a team that changed all that. We had proper recruitment events, where we would invite prospective new customr service team members who had completed applications forms and submitted c.v.’s. They would be given a presentation on the pro’s and con’s of working for the company (for example, if you are a business that expects people to be able to start work at 5 am or finish work after midnight, or if you have strict safety regulations that they have to adhere to, you need to make that very plain at the interview stage). Then we would conduct a structured interview (that’s where the HR and Recruitment people come in – helping you to structure the interview questions and facilitating the process) where two people (yourself and another person, perhaps from HR) would conduct the interview. At the end of each interview, you should have a conversation with your colleague about the person you have just interviewed – do not leave it until the end of the interviewing ‘session’.
There is much more, but the key message is to be involved in who your new team members are. Also, to hire for attitude, not skill. A very forward-thinking company that I know interviewed 3,500 people to recruit 60 customer service team members – that’s how important it is to them to get the right people serving their customers. And yes, their branch managers are very much involved in recruiting their new people.