I hope each of you enjoyed a great Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and you’re ready to push towards a strong finish to the year.

I asked a friend how his Thanksgiving celebration went and his answer surprised me.

“It was smaller and quieter than normal because one member of our extended family expressed some views on Facebook earlier in the week, and the comments offended several other family members. Both of the parties involved (and their immediate family members) decided not to attend the celebration because of the offensive comments.”

This may just sound like some family politics going too far, but it illustrates a broader point about the psychology of attraction.

People with similar values are attracted to each other. By contrast, individuals with dissimilar values repel each other, sometimes quite strongly.

While you won’t be offering your candidates a turkey leg, many hiring managers frequently do things to repel candidates during the interview and follow-up process.

Today, we’ll learn how to turn the tables and become an attractive force.

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There is an old saying that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” While this sounds true, researchers have discovered the opposite is more correct.

Humans tend to be attracted to people and things to which they receive frequent and repeated exposure. It’s a step beyond familiarity, and it applies more directly to recruiting interactions.

Advertising agencies understand this principle. It’s the reason brand advertising exists, and it largely accounts for the $495 billion spent in the global advertising market each year.

You can’t afford to ignore this principle if you want to attract people to you and your organization. Let’s learn how to apply it to recruiting.

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For the last few weeks, we’ve been discussing the psychology of execution. From a recruiting perspective, it’s important to start with this critical foundation.

But, great execution is not enough.

To be a successful hiring manager you’ll need more than just great execution. You’ll also need an understanding of what causes people to become motivated and take action in the recruiting process.

This will multiply your results substantially, and it’s the fun part of recruiting! Your candidates will enjoy this as well because all humans love to be understood.

To tackle this topic in the coming weeks, we’ll break the discussion into three parts—the psychology of attraction, the psychology of persuasion, and the psychology of community.

For those of you who attended the Edge Conference, don’t give up on these topics. While there will be some review, we’ll also cover new information you won’t want to miss.

To start our next part of the journey, let’s first explore the psychology of attraction.

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While I’m sure you’ve heard of the many wonderful technological advances Apple has brought to the world, there’s an important innovation you‘ve probably missed.

It’s a contribution that will help you much more with recruiting than any iPhone or MacBook.

It’s a business process innovation called the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) concept. It’s so simple and obviously helpful, you’ll be asking yourself: Why are we not doing this?

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The end goal of the Continuous Improvement (CI) concept is developing a set of business rules governing your recruiting process.

A “business rule” is a statement describing something your organization has agreed upon as an important component of a high-performing system. A good business rule will be simple, clear, and easy to remember.

While we’ll do our best to initially create the most effective business rules, they will not necessary remain static. Most business rules need to be tweaked and updated over time.

It’s the essence of the CI process. You never quite get to perfection.

How do you develop your own recruiting process business rules? Once you see recruiting as a defined and repeatable process, it flows more easily than you might expect.

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How did you do on the self-inventory of your recruiting system (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, read Part 1)?

For many of us, it initially feels uncomfortable to see recruiting inside the continuous improvement (CI) framework. That’s to be expected because change is difficult and the way to breakthrough performance follows a path outside our normal way of thinking.

The CI framework is a new way of thinking and it will drive a new set of behaviors related to recruiting activities. You can’t turn recruiting into a dependable business process unless you’re able to identify the right things to do (that’s the hard part) and to consistently get those things (new tasks) done.

An abbreviated version of CI will get you started quickly. Follow these six steps and you’ll be on your way to creating a recruiting process you can depend upon.

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