Many Early Learning / Childcare Directors are stressed, busy and tired – they need more from the agency that recruits for them.
If you are an Early Learning Centre Director, you need a reliable team. But you also want:
• to keep an eye on your bottom line while growing occupancy
• to have that optimum staff-child ratio
• to make a positive impact on your families and keep up with the demands of business.
• your staff to be excellent
You need a team that is uniquely suited to meet the needs of your business, so you can collaborate with people who are better suited to your leadership style and philosophical approach. You want to have people on your team that fit in well and therefore, will stay long-term.
Are you asking for too much?
Not if you are using the right recruitment techniques to place candidates that are an excellent fit for your business, right from the very start.
In today’s article, we go through the psychological principles we use to place reliable candidates for our clients.
Knowing what to look for
The first step of applying Psychology to your hiring process is to know what you are looking for. Not just the job title – but also the mindsets that will ensure a candidate’s long term success in your unique business.
Right from the very start, we’ll work closely with you to understand the role in as much detail as possible. Then we go deeper, and use this description to identify the psychological attributes that candidates must have.
We’ll uncover what the most important attributes are, in terms of knowledge, skills, and abilities.
Consider outcomes
To hire the right candidate, it’s important that we consider the outcomes you want to achieve – in both the short term and the long term.
For example, you might be struggling with high employee turnover. This may have cost you time and energy in the past.
In this case, we ensure the recruitment process takes into account the candidate’s longevity.
We use detailed initial discussions and an analysis of each candidate’s individual outlook to determine whether their goals are a match with yours.
Honest and realistic interviewing
Both candidates and employers need to learn more about one another before deciding on the right person for the role. When candidates understand the role more realistically, they will find that their expectations are in line with reality once they start working. And they are more likely to stay in the same organisation in the long term.
When there is a shortage of good candidates, some recruiters will be tempted to sell only the best features of the job. This helps the recruiter send more resumes to you.
Unfortunately, it backfires later, once the employee becomes dissatisfied and quits. It ends up wasting more time and money, for EVERYONE.
An ideal placement meets the needs of both the client and the candidate.
So, in the MH Consulting & Services recruitment process, we’re always providing a complete, comprehensive picture to both our candidates and our clients to ensure they make the right, long term choice.
Interviewer training
It’s not only candidates that need to deliver excellent interviews.
You, or your team, need to ask the right questions during the interview so that you can make an optimal decision.
As part of the MH Consulting & Recruitment service, we believe in preparing your team for the critical task of interviewing candidates. This training helps you to make better judgments and assessments of your interviewees, to provide a similar experience to all candidates, and to compare the candidates as objectively as possible.
Interviews are a popular tool for making hiring decisions, and they should be – but many employers don’t get the most value out of interviews. The best interviews have a clear structure, pose the same questions to all candidates in order to make thorough comparisons and use quality rating scales to rate interview performance. These ratings should be given by the same interviewers, to eliminate differences in biases.
Sell the company
The best candidates are people who don’t just meet the requirements in the job description; you want people who will love working with you and are aligned with your goals and values.
During the MH Recruitment process, we will interview you or your best employees to see what they love about working in your centres. This helps us to understand what benefits we can sell to attract the people who will love working at your organisation.
Evaluating candidates
Interviews are the most popular tool for making hiring decisions because they allow both the employer and the candidate to learn about each other.
However, at MH, we also use a variety of other tools to make well thought out hiring decisions. Depending on the situation, other evaluation methods like Personality Tests, Job Knowledge Tests, Integrity Tests and Assessment Tests may be used in addition to the Interview to help you land the best hires possible.
These tests serve different purposes, depending on the organisation. For example, if the role is repetitive with minimal responsibility, the most intelligent candidates, or the ones looking to grow, might not necessarily be the best fit.
Psychological fit
The MH Team, applies a more personal approach to recruitment by applying the principles of Psychology to vet candidates for the right match of experience and psychological fit. We only introduce you to the top candidates, because the last thing you need is a recruitment process that wastes valuable time.
We know that all our clients are unique, so we go to the extent of vetting for employee-director personality fit. The result of our unique recruitment process is that 95% of our candidates not only fit in well but also stay with their employers long-term.
In case you end up with a bad fit – and that rarely happens – we will be happy to recruit a more suitable candidate.
Wrapping it up …
Contact us if you’d like to find out more.
We offer consulting and recruitment solutions to make sure you get the most out of your Early Childhood staff and business – or we can handle the recruitment process for you and make sure you get the absolute best candidate’s possible for your unique service.