A couple of weeks ago I took my almost-four-year-old to the mall, and I did it all for love. One of Ryleigh’s favorite places is Build-A Bear Workshop. The customer service is fantastic, and they create a “wow” experience for her. Since she is a typical indecisive preschooler, we spent nearly 20 minutes selecting the perfect bear to begin building and customizing just for her. That’s when it hit me. Build-A-Bear is a great strategy to use to build your company’s hiring and selection process.
Just like with the individualized bears that emerge from this shop, we live in a world where the custom is king but the experience trumps all. As consumers, we crave the custom experience of swimming with the dolphins. We covet those 50-yard line football seats at our alma mater. Our steak is cooked to order as we request, but it’s more than that. It’s the ambiance, the settings and the whole packaged experience we crave. We live in a world of options, and I believe our hiring, recruitment and selection processes deserve to be the same. It’s time that the hiring process was individually designed and made custom, specialized, and focused. The end result would provide recruiters with quality candidates, but by ramping up the process, it’s less of a bore and becomes something actually enjoyable.
Creating a customized experience for your recruiter or candidates doesn’t have to cost you a lot of time and money. It’s the small things and the attention to detail up front that counts. By creating those customized touches and integrating them into your hiring and recruitment process, you’ll begin reaping immediate benefits in candidate quality, turnover reduction, and fantastic hiring experience for the recruiter, job seeker, and hiring manager alike.
Mature Services uses eSkill to assess the skill levels of mature job seekers before and after they participate in training programs. The objective test results guide their training plans, and the online assessments increase their clients’ comfort level with using computers.
View NowJessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR, is an author, speaker, Human Resources professional, and workplace social media expert who has a passion for recruiting, training, and all things social media. She is the president and CEO of Xceptional HR, and a leader in the HR community with more than 12 years of industry experience. The author of Tweet This! Twitter for Business, Jessica was named by HR Examiner as the second most influential recruiter on the Internet and the seventh most powerful woman on Twitter. She is a columnist for both SmartBrief and The Huffington Post, in addition to Blogging4Jobs and Human Resources One on One. Jessica has been interviewed for professional articles in CIO Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, SHRM’s HR Magazine, and on CBS. Jessica earned a Senior Professional in Human Resources designation in 2008, and holds a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology and Business from Kansas State University. Originally from a small town in Kansas, Jessica currently lives near Oklahoma City with her husband, Greg and daughter, Ryleigh.
2 Comments
It’s not new that offering customization will boost your company’s success. People like to feel unique, and use unique things, may them be clothes, cars, or even stuffed teddy bears. And while I agree with it, I also see the limits of it. You can do custom if you are not somebody that uses an assembly line. How do you fit customization in your manufacturing process then?
What I feel Trish fails to see here, is that Jessica is not actually trying to give advice to somebody in the manufacturing business, but she is trying to make a point for HR people, to try and have custom ways to deal with different situations and people. Being stuck on certain procedures and protocols can work in some situations, but prove disastrous in others. So just have some leeway when dealing with your HR issues and everything should be ok.