ISEMENT
So how can you
improve your chances of
making a successful hire?
And probably the most important
element is the cultural fit. The
‘DNA’ match between the client
and the candidate is of paramount
importance. And I can speak from
personal experience. The company I
founded in 1989 was acquired by an
American corporation in 2003 and I
worked for them for four years prior
to their acquisition by a much larger
European company. The American
working environment fitted me to a
‘T’. It had a start-up culture (although
it had been founded over 20 years
before I joined) which encouraged
individual entrepreneurship with
the ‘better to beg forgiveness than
ask for permission’ approach. The
large European company had a very
different structure and culture. A
great company nevertheless, but one
that didn’t suit my motivations, values
and behaviours. But knowing how
corporate culture can be different now
helps us find the right people who fit
in. Round pegs for round holes.
In fact, it was this that made me
think about recruitment for the data
centre industry way back in 2010.
The way people were being hired for
this mission critical business was just
‘Research shows that a single
miss-hire costs companies
between four and 14 times
their annual salary.’
plain wrong and might explain why
over 60 per cent of downtime was
attributed to people (Source APC,
Operational Intelligence). Errors in
design, mistakes in build and just
plain old stupidity in operations.
Putting together a football team with
your mates is fine for a kickaround
in the park. But you won’t win the
Champions League. But people
were getting hired because they
‘knew someone’. And still are. No
wonder that the Chartered Institute
of Personnel and Development in the
UK states that three out of four hires
for your business are wrong.
Global employment research
shows that, when asked who of their
team truly adds value to the company,
the majority of managers replied that
on average it is only one in four of
their team! Research also shows that
a single miss-hire costs companies
between four and 14 times their
Catherine Adam, founder of Alchemy (a sister
company to Chemistry www.alchemy.london) and
non-executive director of performance improvement
at Datacenter People (DCP), is applying these
Chemistry principles to her work with us, examining
the profiles (Intellect, Values, Motivations, Behaviours
and Experience) of all the people we have in DCP to
make sure we are working on the right things to get
the best out of them and make sure we provide the
best service to our clients. Once we have that picture
we will then be implementing development plans for
each one of them to give them all an opportunity to
be brilliant at work. As part of this process Catherine
will be speaking to our customers and getting their
view on our people and what they think we could be
doing differently to increase the value of the service
we offer. This will be fed into the development plans
and used to increase the value of the business we do
for our clients and candidates.
For us to really be able to understand our clients
and to know what the right DNA is for them and their
roles, we have to be able to understand ourselves
first. If we do, we can then use this to get the right
people for clients every time, reducing attrition and
increasing the chances of success so that they
have at least a 75 per cent chance of getting a truly
valuable employee to join their business.
annual salary, so the cost of getting
it wrong is one of the biggest
profit killers for companies. This is
exaggerated in mission critical roles
and senior hires.
datacenterpeople.org