Back when I was hiring for my ice cream store, I would get hundreds of resumes online and in-store to fill a small number of positions. On the surface, working in an ice cream store sounds like an amazing gig – you get to hang out, eat ice cream, and make some people’s day better. While that was mostly true, it was also a very physically demanding, taxing job – scooping ice cream for hours on end was not for everyone. For my first few years of hiring, we had a lot of turnover in the first 90 days of employment. I’d find people who seemed great in the interview, hire them, and then almost immediately see the reality shock once they got behind the counter. I had just accepted this as an unavoidable reality until a fellow store owner told me a she had tackled this problem – and I immediately saw a change in our hiring success rate.
At her store, before scheduling interviews, she sent candidates an email outlining – counterintuitively – all of the bad things about the job. The list of requirements included the ability to frequently work late nights, a willingness to be constantly cleaning and washing a never-ending piles of dishes, and the ability to manage huge rushes under pressure.
Why on earth would she do that? Because the candidates who read through this list of reasons to not take the job and indicated that they were still interested were ones who had bought in. They knew exactly what they were getting into on their first day, and were mentally prepared. I used this process for several years, and consistently found that fewer than 50% of those I reached out to would decide to continue on to an interview. That meant I decreased the time I spent conducting interviews while increasing our quality of hires. Any time you can get better results with less effort is a win in my books!
If you’re thinking about giving this a try, we’d love to know if it helps! Be sure to message us with your results.
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