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Defining your people requirements

The key to a successful recruitment and selection campaign, and an enduring employment relationship, is to make sure you know what you need from the person filling the position and then select based on that knowledge. Knowing what the job looks like and what skills, experience and attitudes the person must have all help to make sure you have the right criteria to judge applicants. This way you reduce the chance of making what can be a costly mistake.

The flowchart below describes the employment process. The first three steps are often neglected but are the foundation of making a good decision. Each step builds on the previous one to give a clear picture of who you need to recruit.  This section provides an outline on how to make sure you know who is needed. 

The Recruitment and Selection Process

Recruitment and selection diagram

  • You can also download a PDF version of the Recruitment and Selection Process diagram View PDF (739kb)
Learn from your last employee

An exit interview when someone leaves your employment is a good first step and a potentially valuable learning opportunity that can shed light on the job description and what you need in an employee.  It can also provide insight into your strengths and weaknesses as an employer, providing the opportunity to work with them by hiring someone who will balance the team. If possible the interview should be conducted with a third party so the employee feels more able to provide honest feedback.

  • For more information: Template: How to conduct exit interviews   View PDF (61kb)
Staff planning

Staff planning is the process of deciding what has to be done on the farm and who is going to do it. Quite simply, you list what jobs have to be done on farm and assign members of the team responsibility to make sure they are done. This forms the basis of a job description and can be provided to the potential employee so they can see where they fit in the farm team.

When completing a staff plan it’s important to allocate responsibility, not just tasks! Handing over responsibility empowers people to take initiative and get on with the job. Allocating tasks, on the other hand, makes the employee incredibly reliant on you for direction and decision making and can kill initiative. Obviously handing over responsibility depends on the skill and experience of the person in question and your willingness to train them and support their growth.

Job descriptions

A job description provides a broad outline of the job and details responsibility areas. It’s the best opportunity to communicate your expectations of the person filling the role to the applicants, building on your staff plan. It’s also a legal requirement.

There are lots of different ways to write a job description and the approach you take will depend on the level of position. A high level position will describe responsibility areas, whereas a job description for a junior staff member may provide more detail about the tasks required of them. Have a look at the examples below. Whichever approach you use, try to make the job description meaningful for your farm. For example, maintaining a “tidy dairy” can mean different things on different farms – not everyone has the same standards.

A job description should be given to all applicants you intend to interview. This gives them the chance to raise any questions or concerns at the interview, helping both parties to increase their understanding of the applicant’s suitability.

Person specification

The person specification builds on the job description and describes the knowledge, skills, abilities and attitudes an applicant would ideally have to perform the job.  You should decide which of these are “must haves” and which ones you may be prepared to compromise on.  For example, punctuality may be a non-negotiable must have while you may be prepared to take someone with less experience.

The person specification is mostly for the use of the employer and only relevant parts of it might be shared in the job advert.

Note: It is important that the person specification is linked to job performance. Where you judge people on factors not related to performance, you are likely to be discriminating in an illegal way and putting yourself at legal risk.

Selecting on attitude vs skill

Employers will often report that they recruit on attitude, as you can teach skills. This is a good approach but attitude must also be defined and employers often get this wrong. Attitude is a combination of behaviours that you should be able to describe, like being on time or willing to give things a go. It’s these behaviours you need to identify in the person specification as you can validate them by asking referees. 

Liking a job candidate, for whatever reason, is also often mistaken for a good attitude. If you get on with them they will be more agreeable, which can be seen as having a good attitude. If you do like them, what you have identified is a good team fit, which in one farmer’s words “makes it a lot easier to deal with their mistakes”.

Selection criteria

Having completed the person specification, you have the information to develop your selection criteria. Quite simply you choose the six to 10 things in the person specification that are must haves in your business. For example, if an employee will be required to carry out feed budgeting, their skill in this area would be one of the selection criteria. Then you design an interview and referee checking programme to determine if the candidate meets your criteria.

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