Recruitment

Staff turnover is one of the biggest hidden costs in any business. Recruitment is expensive, and most of the cost is invisible — management time spent interviewing, training investment in people who leave within weeks, the disruption to a team that keeps losing members. The real problem isn't finding candidates. It's finding the right ones and keeping them past the first month.

Every time someone leaves, the cycle starts again: write the ad, sift applications, schedule interviews, make an offer, train the new person, hope they stay. Each round costs time and money that could have gone into running a better operation. And the longer a vacancy sits open, the more pressure falls on the team that remains.

The business case for fixing recruitment is straightforward:

• The cost of replacing a team member is significant. Recruitment fees, management hours spent interviewing, training time, and lost productivity during the gap add up quickly. For an entry-level role, the total cost of replacement is often several thousand pounds. For a senior or specialist position, it can be much more.
• Most early leavers go within 90 days. They leave because the job wasn't what they expected, because onboarding was chaotic, or because nobody checked whether they were coping. These aren't bad hires — they're failures of process.
• Without structure, hiring quality depends on who runs the interview. One manager asks rigorous questions and scores answers. Another has a chat and goes with their gut. The result is inconsistency — some great hires, some poor ones, and no way to tell why.

A complete recruitment programme has three parts:

Video Job Ads

Stand out from every other job ad

Job Interviews

Consistent interviews, better hires

New Starter Onboarding

They're part of the team before day one

The three parts form a sequence: attract the right candidates, assess them fairly, then give them the structured start that determines whether they stay. Each part depends on the others — a great job ad followed by a chaotic interview wastes the goodwill you built. A rigorous interview followed by no onboarding plan loses the person you just carefully selected. And poor job ads mean even the best interview process is working with the wrong candidates.

Part 1: Attracting the right candidates

Traditional job ads are remarkably similar to one another. A wall of text listing duties and requirements, a vague promise of a "competitive salary," and perhaps a line about being a "dynamic team." Candidates scroll past dozens of these every day. Nothing distinguishes your role from the identical ad posted by your competitor down the road.

The result is a flood of generic applications from people who applied everywhere, mixed with a handful of candidates who might actually be right for your specific operation. Managers then spend hours sifting through CVs that all look the same, trying to guess who might actually turn up and stay.

Video changes this dynamic. When candidates can see your actual workplace, hear from the manager they'd be working with, and get a genuine feel for the environment, self-selection happens before the interview. People who wouldn't enjoy the role don't apply. People who would enjoy it get excited. The applications you receive are fewer but better — candidates who already know what they're signing up for.

A great video job ad doesn't need high production values. In fact, over-produced videos feel corporate and inauthentic — exactly what you're trying to avoid. What works is a manager speaking naturally, filmed in the actual workplace — the shop floor, the warehouse, the kitchen, the office. Sixty to ninety seconds is enough. Cover what the role involves day-to-day, what the team is like, and what you're looking for in a person. That's it.

Showing the role is always more powerful than describing it. A quick walk through the workspace, a shot of the team during a morning briefing, a glimpse of the environment where the work actually happens — these tell a candidate more about what the job is actually like than any list of bullet points ever could.

How Pilla helps with job ads

Pilla lets you record and share video job ads directly from the app. You don't need separate filming equipment, editing software, or a social media strategy — just your phone and something worth showing.

• Record and share video job ads directly from the app, no editing or external tools needed
• Blog articles guide you on what to cover for each specific role — what candidates want to know, what to film, what to say
• A growing library of role-specific video job ad templates with talking points and filming guidance, spanning a wide range of roles and industries

What a good video job ad covers

The best video job ads answer the questions candidates actually have:

• What does a typical day or shift look like?
• Who will I be working with?
• What's the workplace actually like?
• What will I learn or how will I develop?

You don't need a script. Speak naturally about why someone would enjoy the role, show the environment they'd be working in, and be honest about what the job demands. Authenticity attracts the right people and filters out the wrong ones before you've spent a minute interviewing them.

Part 2: Assessing candidates consistently

Unstructured interviews feel natural, but they're poor predictors of job performance. When each interviewer asks different questions in a different order, you can't meaningfully compare candidates. What you end up measuring is interview performance — confidence, articulacy, charm — not the competencies that actually matter in the role.

Gut feeling is just bias with a more comfortable name. Research consistently shows that unstructured interviews favour candidates who are similar to the interviewer, who are physically attractive, or who happen to make a strong first impression. Quiet competence loses to charismatic talking. This isn't a theoretical problem — it's the reason many businesses keep hiring people who interview well and perform poorly.

Structured interviewing means asking every candidate the same questions, in the same order, and scoring their answers against defined criteria. This doesn't make the interview robotic — you're still having a conversation. But you're having a conversation that produces comparable data. When you're choosing between three candidates, you can look at scores rather than relying on who you liked most.

Competency-based questions test what actually predicts job performance. Instead of "Tell me about yourself," you ask questions that require candidates to demonstrate relevant experience: "Describe a time you had to deal with a difficult customer complaint" or "How would you handle a situation where a critical delivery arrived incomplete just before a deadline?" These questions reveal how someone thinks and responds, not just how well they talk.

Practical assessments add another dimension. For hands-on roles, a brief task reveals technique, organisation, and speed in a way no question can. For customer-facing roles, a role-play scenario shows how someone actually interacts with people. These elements take ten minutes and tell you more than an hour of conversation.

How Pilla helps with interviews

Pilla provides structured interview templates as work items that guide your managers through a consistent process:

• Structured interview templates with scored competency areas, so every candidate is assessed against the same criteria
• Score each competency area during the interview, producing comparable data across candidates
• Timestamped records for comparing candidates objectively and defending hiring decisions
• A growing library of role-specific templates with scored questions, practical assessment guidance, and red flags to watch for

Why records matter

Documenting interviews protects your business and improves your process. If a candidate challenges a hiring decision, you have scored records showing the basis for your choice. More importantly, over time you build a picture of which interview scores actually predict job performance — and you can refine your questions accordingly.

Part 3: Getting new starters up to speed

The first week determines whether a new starter stays. Research consistently shows that structured onboarding is the single strongest predictor of early retention. When someone arrives to a chaotic first day — no one expecting them, no plan, told to shadow someone who's too busy to explain anything — they start looking for another job before the week is out.

The difference between "shadow someone" and structured onboarding is the difference between improvisation and a documented programme. Shadowing depends entirely on who happens to be working that day, how busy they are, and whether they're any good at explaining things. A structured programme covers the same ground every time, regardless of which trainer is available.

Progressive skill building works better than information dumping. Day one should be orientation — the building, the team, the basics. Days two and three introduce core tasks with supervised practice. Days four and five move towards supported independence, where the new starter handles tasks with a trainer nearby but not hovering. This progression builds confidence and competence in parallel.

Daily check-ins are essential but often skipped. A five-minute conversation at the end of each day catches gaps before they compound. "What went well today? What are you unsure about? What do you need for tomorrow?" These simple questions surface problems that a new starter wouldn't volunteer — because they don't want to seem incompetent, or because they don't yet know what they don't know.

Assessment questions throughout the programme verify understanding rather than assuming it. Watching someone complete a task tells you they can follow instructions. Asking them why it matters, what could go wrong, or what they'd do differently in a specific scenario tells you whether they've actually understood.

How Pilla helps with onboarding

Pilla provides five-day onboarding programmes as structured work items, giving every new starter the same thorough introduction regardless of which manager is on shift:

• Five-day programmes as structured work items with daily objectives, training guidance, assessment questions, and trainer notes
• Welcome videos and policy documents sent before day one, so new starters arrive already familiar with the basics
• Progressive structure building from orientation on day one to supported independence by day five
• A growing library of role-specific programmes, each tailored to the skills and knowledge that role requires

What structured onboarding covers

A typical five-day programme moves through a clear progression:

• Day 1 — Welcome, orientation, introductions, health and safety basics, tour of the workplace
• Day 2 — Core role tasks with demonstration and supervised practice
• Day 3 — Expanded responsibilities, working alongside experienced team members
• Day 4 — Increasing independence with trainer oversight, handling common scenarios
• Day 5 — Assessment, review of the week, goals for the coming weeks, feedback both ways

Each day ends with a check-in and notes, creating a record of progress and any areas that need additional support.

The complete recruitment cycle

Attract, assess, and onboard are not three separate activities. They form a continuous improvement cycle where each part informs the others.

Feedback from onboarding reveals what candidates weren't prepared for — and that tells you what your job ad should have covered. If every new starter is surprised by the pace of the busiest periods, your job ad needs to show the reality, not just the quiet moments. If onboarding consistently uncovers gaps in core knowledge, your interview should test for it.

Interview red flags that predict early leaving become more visible over time. If candidates who score poorly on resilience questions consistently leave within the first month, you know that competency matters more than you thought. If practical assessment scores correlate strongly with trainer feedback during onboarding, you know to weight those scores more heavily. But none of this learning is possible unless you're documenting the process — the interview scores, the onboarding feedback, the reasons people give when they leave.

Each hire teaches you something about what works for your specific operation. The businesses that improve their recruitment over time are the ones that treat it as a system to be refined, not an administrative chore to be endured.

Getting started

Where you start depends on where you are:

If you struggle to attract candidates — Start with video job ads. Most businesses are competing for the same people with identical text ads. A short video showing your actual workplace and team will immediately differentiate you from every other listing.

If you hire well but people leave quickly — Start with onboarding. Early leavers are almost always a symptom of poor induction, not poor hiring. A structured five-day programme gives new starters the support they need to get through the critical first week.

If you're not sure whether you're hiring the right people — Start with structured interviews. Consistent questions and scored criteria will quickly show you whether your current process is selecting for the right things — or just selecting for interview confidence.