In a previous article, I wrote about five critical elements to give you your greatest chance of attracting and retaining your team members.

What I’d like to look at this week is a revisit of the step before retention. That is attraction, how do you attract talent in the first place?

Before we discuss attraction, let’s do a quick review of retention.

The five critical elements you need are:

1) Do you have the right people?

2) Are they motivated?

3) Do they know what to do?

4) Do they know how to do it?

5) Do you have the right environment to nurture success?

By having these five elements in place you will gain a positive reputation as an employer of choice and you will attract quality team members.

So getting back to attraction, or more specifically – recruiting. What do you do amongst the noise of other businesses competing for the best talent as prospective team members?

I often review the employment sites, checking out local and state wide recruiting activity. It gives me a feel for where businesses are at, what industry sectors are growing and so on; it’s a good indicator of business confidence.

What I also notice is the way in which recruitment adverts are written. I must say many of the adverts I read are not very inspiring. They hardly grab my attention.

Here’s the thing – this works to your advantage. By differentiating yourself in the way your present your recruitment adverts, you give yourself a far better chance of standing out.

How do you stand out then? Most adverts I see simply state simple facts about the role or position on offer. Very few adverts say anything about what your business stands for, about where your business is going, why your business is great place to work.

Essentially, you need to build emotion into the advert. Here’s a guarantee – all decisions, and I mean every single one is made on emotion, then we justify ourselves by adding logic. We are either moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure, or a combination of both. Take some time to think about that. Have a look at decision you recently took. Be honest with yourself, was it moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure?

If there is no emotion in your recruitment adverts and it’s all logic, no deal! You fall into the overwhelming noise of other businesses competing for your prospective talented team members.