Managing the power of first impressions
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How much of a gamble are you taking when you make the decision to offer someone a job?
No-one can be certain how anyone will perform in a new role, until they are established and performing. There are always risks in hiring. These risks can be contained, by taking a few simple steps. Steps which are worth taking for employers who are focused on:
- Attracting great applicants.
- Selecting the people who are most likely to excel.
- Getting their offers accepted by the people they select, then retaining and developing them successfully.
The cost of a bad hire has been estimated to be around three times the salary paidi. This is a cost every employer would want to avoid; and at a time of massive skills shortages and poor staff retention, those recruiting need to deploy every method they can, to find the best, right people.
This can mean rethinking aspects of how we recruit and select. In the motor trade, pressures on employers come from many sources. Government, schools and colleges, the media and many other institutions could be doing more to help attract talent into this exciting sector – where vacancy rates are still higher than the national average.
The decisions on how to find and select the best, right people though, remain with the employing organisation. And defaulting to traditional “wisdom” in recruitment can prove to be very unproductive.
By looking closely at how we go about recruitment and discarding some of the myths that have guided recruiters for many years, we can make it easier to attract great candidates and to know we are choosing well.
The employer brand makes a difference
The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development have found that in 2024, 81% of organisations took steps to improve their employer brandii, by looking at how they presented themselves through channels such as social media and what the candidate experience and employee offer said about them.
The employer brand is everything that makes up the reputation of an organisation as a place to work – every employer has one, whether they intend to have one or not. Being intentional about your employer brand is a critical step towards attracting (and later retaining) the kind of people you need to have working for you.
And as successful customer-facing brands are based on a good understanding of the target market, insight into what is important to that market and an ability to appeal to it, good employer brands are also about knowing the audience.
What people want from work is changing. No employer can or should try to offer all things to all people; understanding the people you are trying to employ helps you to engage with them, through the journey from attraction to appointment.
The established Generation X (currently aged between about 45 and 60) has a reputation for a strong work ethic and a preference for independence and autonomy at work.
Millennials / Generation Y (late twenties to mid-forties) are associated more with a desire for flexibility and career progression; research into Generation Z (13 – 28) shows them seeking employers where they can identify with their purpose and where their wellbeing will be a priority. Money, by the way is a consideration for all generations, varying in its importance to different individuals.
Knowing what people want from work does not enable an employer to meet every potential employee’s needs. It helps employers to be in tune with candidates and to be clear about what they can do to be attractive places to work.
And the promise made by an employer brand should be binding. Candidates will start to learn about the culture of an organisation from the first contact they have with it – and will quickly spot any major inconsistencies between the way the employer markets itself and the experience of actually dealing with them.
Great employee experience and engagement benefit the employer too
There is now a solid base of evidence to show that employees who are engaged and bought into what their employers do are more productive. Organisations that have employees who are highly engaged experience a 21% increase in profitability, in contrast to those that have minimal engagementiii.
Engagement is a product of many things, including the experience of being hired by, and working for, an organisation. Thinking the employee offer through and understanding what is important to employees, leads to higher, sustained engagement. And therefore, better performance.
This is about a positive two-way relationship between people and work – employees and their employers. It’s about creating an environment where people want to come to work and contribute to the success of the organisation they work for.
Despite the volume of proof that employee engagement generates productivity and financial success, it still staggers us how often we hear people ask, “but what’s in it for the employer?” whenever the topic is discussed in a public forum.
And potential employees are becoming increasingly aware of what to look out for in their potential employer. Their early experiences – through the recruitment process – say a lot about the recruiting organisation’s level of interest in having this positive, two-way relationship.
The first impression of the candidate is not the whole person
Then there is the moment when the people managing the selection process meet a candidate for the first time. Here, there are years of received wisdom, often relied upon by recruiters, that can lead to the wrong person being selected.
It is well known that “first impressions count”. Sometimes they count for the wrong reason.
When we coach people who are applying for jobs, we make sure they are aware that they will be making an impression on recruiters from the moment they arrive.
When training managers in effective recruitment practice, we tell them that first impressions are not always helpful. Who are we lying to?
Both are true. Research has showniv that when we meet someone for the first time, it takes a tenth of a second for us to start forming a view of that person, based on any information our brains can find to work with – appearance, mannerism, voice. Unconsciously, we start to become biased about that person.
Candidates need to be aware of this; knowing that the person they meet might be forming an impression this early on will help them to take some control of what that impression might be.
For people who are recruiting, it’s more useful to be aware that this unconscious bias is happening and suspend opinions until there is more information available about what the person is really like and what they can do.
Related to this, another common practice in recruitment has been to include factors like the body language and facial expressions of candidates in making judgements about them. We have even seen recruitment interview guides with notes such as “How firm was their handshake?” and “Did they make eye contact throughout?”. This is a very dangerous route to go down.
It is of course true that body language and facial expression may tell us something about a person’s state of mind, perhaps their level of interest in the conversation. Interpreting someone’s behaviour through our own lens means assuming that they work the same way we do, and that seeing the expression we might have when we think a certain way tells us they are thinking that way too.
For many years it was accepted that there are “universal” facial expressions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) that are unassailable proof of how any person is feeling, regardless of their background or culture. Recent researchv questions the universality of these expressions and there are some basic hard facts to be aware of too – eye contact, for example, is not something that everyone can do easily.
Body language and facial expression have meaning. They are not reliable though in taking us to the facts. If a candidate appears shocked or surprised by something we say, is it better to ask, “what do you think about that?” (with genuine interest) or to challenge them on why they “clearly” have a problem with it?
Know what you need to know – and how to find it
The selection process needs to establish a lot of things about a candidate and their suitability for a role. Technical skills, currently at a massive premium in the industry, can be easier to verify or assess for than attitudes or behaviours such as customer centricity or approaches to working. Other skills, such as communication, in particular electronic communication, can also be tricky. All matter.
The selection process should be designed to enable recruiters to find evidence of all relevant skills and we need to pay attention to those skills that are emerging and growing in importance.
Changes in technology which impact everyone, such as the proliferation of electronic communication channels and the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, are naturally changing how we work. As such, we cannot afford to make assumptions about how comfortable our candidates are in working with them. As examples, social media skills are now critical for many customer facing roles; AI may speed up and improve accuracy on some administrative tasks when it is used well – or cause chaos when it isn’t.
The interview environment we choose can help or hinder us here; a traditional face to face interview can bring us closer to the individual and some of their interpersonal skills (if we are mindful of the caveats in the previous section); these are harder to observe in an online interview. Conversely, the online environment is an effective and efficient space to find out about a candidate’s comfort levels with certain technologies.
As recruiters, our task is to understand the candidate and their suitability for the role. By being super clear on what we need to know, and creating an open, relaxed environment where candidates can be themselves, we increase our chances of making a good hire.
There’s lots more we can do to find and hire the best, right people and to attract more talent into this exciting industry. Getting first impressions right, from all angles, is a great start.
The Motivation Agency are employee engagement and training specialists, who develop solutions to promote success, productivity and happiness across employer organisations of all types.