17: The Best Way To Hire The Best Secretary With Recruiter Estee Cohen
Estee Cohen gives us the wisdom to hire the low level positions in your company – from the secretary to the truck driver, the delivery person and the medical assistants. These unsung heroes are critical to your business success and Estee gives us her best tips and tools to get the right people in, as well as discussing her struggle with managing and training staff , for which we came up with an innovative shortcut solution.
My Guest: Estee Cohen
Pivotal Moments
- After teaching for 7 years, at an award ceremony for a colleague who was celebrating 30 years of teaching, Estee realized teaching was not her calling – she didn’t want that award.
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Helped her husband launch his wholesale business, acting as COO and HR manager.
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Wanted to start her own thing, and began looking for a career switch. Took some classes towards a medical career.
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Needed a job, and applied for over 100 positions with no clear direction in mind, which laid the ground work for seeing things from the perspective of the recruited.
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Landed a job hiring doctors, utilizing her medicine background.
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Assisted head hunter who worked on C-suite positions for $60,000 per hire! Saw this was not the kind of recruiting she wanted to do, and found her niche in low entry level positions – a space that was sorely lacking and one she fills really well.
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In her job doing contract recruiting, she built up skills and repertoire until she realized that she could do it herself.
The Advice
How to hire your entry level position staff members (secretary, nursing assistant, medical assistant, administrator):
1. Think like them. What do they want that will make them stay long term?
2. If you want to pay less, look for someone who has transferable skills. If you are willing to pay more, take someone with specific skills and experience for what you are looking for.
3. Start in your own network, leverage your social channels. Only if your network doesn’t produce potential candidates look outside in places like Craigslist, Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn…
4. When you are interviewing, hear how the candidates talk and how they process information. Listen more, talk less and ask open ended questions.
5. Get a company website. List that you have open positions and people will find you that way.
The Struggle
Like so many business owners, Estee has more work to do then there are hours in her day – or at least hours she wants to spend working. Most of Estee’s time is spent interviewing candidates, so she hired someone to help her with that. Her struggle now is that it is difficult to get a good sense of a candidate by reading her assistant’s conversation notes – and that feel for each candidate is vital to Estee’s success. How can she get the help she needs with the interviewing process, while still getting a real sense for every candidate?
The Breakthrough
Though Estee cannot listen to all call recordings, she could get a better understanding of each candidate by having each call transcribed. This is a much easier and quicker way to absorb information and would serve two purposes. Firstly, Estee would be able to quickly get a handle on each conversation and secondly, she could further train her interviewer by showing her where she could have asked more, different or better questions. A double win!
Quotes
“The truth is in the silence.“
Resources and Links
- Find Estee: www.californiajobshop.
com - Find Estee on social media: Facebook, LinkedIn
- Hire or get hired: Monster, Indeed, Craigslist, LinkedIn
- Work with Estie: www.strandconsulting.
net - Join us on the Show: www.estierand.com/
breakthrough
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