Advertising for Staff
The following information was presented at Dairy Days March 2008 by Lee Astridge / Sarah Watson, and provides advice on how to advertise for your next employee.
Recruitment
The Right Advert
Your advertisement is our opportunity to ‘sell’ your job to the right kind of candidates.
When putting together your advert, think first about why someone would want to work for you and do that job?.Talk about these things first in your advert because they will be the ‘point of difference’ that will attract people to your position.
When advertising, particularly in the current recruitment market, it is critical that you establish what you can do for the potential employee first?.and ideally this will be different to all of the other adverts out there!
Next, think about the kind of person who would be able to fulfil the requirements of your position. Try and word these requirements positively i.e.
- Looking for a challenge
- Enthusiastic about a career in farming
- Proven ability to ???.
- Keen to work unsupervised
- Looking for a great mentor
The following ideas were taken from our Dairwn discussion forum and offer some great ideas for advertisements
Experience required? ? keep your options open
I have recently had conversations with some very successful and very interesting people who are seriously looking to come into our industry. The fact that some have no prior experience in dairying should not be a negative if you are looking for staff. These people have many valuable skills from their current and past employment histories and let's face it, putting cups on cows and the other basic practical tasks are very easy to teach and learn. On the other hand, these people have motivation and an attitude towards achieving success which is something that cannot be taught and is often not present in those who go dairying just because it's a job with a house.
If you are advertising on fencepost, please put "experience required" if that is your requirement. Career changers are being encouraged to look on fencepost for positions and to also put their own advert on. Knocking them back at the first contact by saying "you have no experience, we don't want you" is a bit unfair if you haven't specified that experience is necessary. They may be intelligent but they are not mind readers! At a time when attracting good staff is necessary, you might also like to think about how professional your approach is. I have had comments from job applicants who have selected one job from a choice of offers simply because of the professional way in which the farmer dealt with them.
Word of Mouth
People often ask what works best for attracting good staff in ads etc, but the most important thing to remember is that you could have the most amazing recruitment system and advertisements in the world, but a good track record and word of mouth seems to be the best way to attract good people to your business!
Fencepost for advertising
We have placed two adds in the paper and posted one on Fencepost (this was in Dec.). We had approx. 8 good replies on the paper add and more than 10 replies not counting replies from Kenya, India etc.) through Fencepost.com. We have found that there are some really good (potential) LOS out there and were impressed with the replies.
We have been employing staff for the last 7 years. We have found that we get the best response by using the job listing service on Fencepost. We find that keen and interested people look for jobs on the website. We are in the process of employing at the moment and have had a very good response to our ad. Make sure that you think very carefully about what sort off job you are listing and the qualifications that you think the applicants will need. Check references! We have learned this to be very important. Trust your instincts at job interviews and make sure that the applicants get a chance to tell you what they would like to get out off the job. It might not be the same as you would like. Good luck. There are some great people out there!
Links to useful websites:
Fencepost ? Home Page
Businessballs.com ? Guide to advertising for jobs
