Recruitment lessons to learn from England’s Big Sam debacle

As we’ve seen from the latest blunder with the former England manager, Sam Allardyce, choosing the wrong candidate for the job can have a negative impact on the staff and the business.  

After the Iceland defeat ended England’s participation in Euro 2016, and Roy Hodgson resigned, there was a fairly uninspiring list of candidates for the manager’s job. The result was the appointment of Allardyce, who lasted just 67 days before imploding in a reasonably predictable manner.

But what should businesses do when they also have an urgent vacancy but are struggling to find a suitable applicant.

What do you dislike?

Parna Recruitment’s Resha Chan says it’s important to establish exactly why you dislike the current candidates.

“Look at where they are falling short, is it their knowledge or is it literally just down to personality and them not gelling,” she said.

Trim the trimmings

According to recruitment expert, Reena Nathwani the ideal candidate is much like a Christmas tree, perfectly fitted to the space and heavily decorated with all the right trimmings in all the right places.

She said: “Every employer has an idea of what they’re looking for and it’s often a very specific person to fit into a specific team, but the skills can be quite varied.”

If you can’t find that person, she suggests taking off a few tree trimmings or adding to what you have to offer.

If you can increase the budget to purchase a higher quality tree, then do it as it will be worth the money once you have a skilled member of staff filling the position.

But, don’t hire just anybody

It’s possible that you need the candidate to fill the position as soon as possible to ensure the job gets done and one way to solve this problem is to compromise on experience.

Reena said: “Bring someone in, train them and mould them to the level they need to be.” However this is time consuming and may not be the best option for the particular role you have available, especially if it requires a degree of experience from the beginning.

Just like the England team have had to do, find someone you can get for the interim, whether that means bringing in a contractor or someone who works on a day rate, it might be the best option until you can source the ideal candidate for the role. 

Widen the search

Another approach would be to source a specialist within the industry and use them as a third party to tap into their market and search for inactive candidates.

Resha said: “See if there’s anyone that they’d know of that maybe isn’t actively looking but would be interested if they knew about the opportunity.”

That is at least one problem the FA doesn’t have, with the entire footballing world knowing about the vacancy. But it won’t make it any easier for them to recruit a high-quality candidate.

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