The Lynx effect and recruitment

A news article from last week about a road traffic accident caught my eye. The accident took place in Texas which in of itself isn’t that unusual, but what made me take notice was what the truck was transporting. The truck was transporting male deodorant and ended up catching fire which resulted in the road section that it was on being severely damaged due to the intensity of the heat of the fire. Luckily no one was injured in the accident.

The deodorant that the truck was transporting was Axe which is the US trade name of Lynx so this of course conjured up a number of thoughts about the outcome of the accident. My first thought was that the road around the accident must have smelted like a teenage boys’ bedroom for about week afterwards, but then I wondered if the ‘Lynx effect’ would take place? Surely, a concentration of that amount of deodorant would, as the adverts suggest, attract scantily clad ladies to flock to the scene of the fire? I’m pleased to say that this didn’t happen especially as it was in the middle of the night when the accident took place.

However, part of the advertising strategy for Lynx in the past has been positioning the spray as attractive to the object of your desire – the so called ‘Lynx effect’. Often in the ads the liberal application of the spray results in the wearer suddenly becoming irresistible. This is overstating the impact of wearing a deodorant but it did get me thinking about what we can do to help to attract the right candidates to our businesses and organisations.

The starting point has to be about your business and the culture that you have. What are the benefits that you can offer a new recruit (as well as existing members of staff)? These don’t necessarily have to be financial. A flexible approach to work is often considered to be a key benefit for staff. In research undertaken by BT, 80% of UK office workers rated ‘flexible working as one of their top 3 priorities from a benefits package’. Similar percentages were seen from responders to the survey based in Germany, Spain and France. Is your business doing enough to keep your staff happy and contented? Remember whenever you recruit someone new to your business, then someone else is losing that person from their team. Therefore, make sure that your team are as content and rewarded as you can in order to minimise your recruitment requirements.

There are two benefits in making sure that your business culture is as strong as possible. Firstly, you will tend to retain your best people anyway which will reduce your recruitment costs and secondly, your reputation for having a great culture will encourage people to find out more about your business and want to join. Checking out platforms such as Glassdoor will give you an idea of how your staff rate your business.

The next aspect to consider when trying to attract a new person into your vacant role (assuming you’ve not got anyone in your business currently who could make the move) is to understand what type of person do you want? What skills and experience will they need for the vacant role? Can you hire someone with the right attitude and train them to fulfil the role. From understanding what you’re looking for, it can then inform you of where to look for these candidates. A good recruitment consultancy can help in this regard as well.

From this definition of what you’re looking for and where likely candidates matching your requirements might be looking for new roles, you can then write an accurate job description to advertise your vacancy. A good job description and advert should ‘sell’ the job as much as possible and sell the opportunity as well as you would with the product or service that your business offers. Emphasise the opportunities for progression and development as well as the other benefits to the role.

Finally, when you have built up a shortlist of suitable candidates then you need to make sure that the interview itself goes as effectively and efficiently as possible. Make sure that you have the right people to run the interview and that they are suitably prepared for the interview. Do they know the vacant role sufficiently and have they researched the candidates properly? With a lot of industries seeing a dry up of quality candidates, then you need to make sure that your team doing the interview are selling your opportunity well to the good candidates. If they are as good as you think that they are, then they are likely to have other opportunities open to them.

These are just a few hints and tips for getting your hiring right, but partnering with an experienced and credible recruitment consultancy such as Amoria Bond can accelerate this process and help you find the right candidates for the roles that you have available