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Recruitment of a General Manager

How we recruited a General Manager for an IT services provider

Our client

Our client is a leading office products, business technology and managed services partner to businesses in the Great Southern region. Their approach to business means that they work strategically with their customers to ensure all goals are met.

Location - Albany, WA
Industry - IT
Size - 20 employees

We applied our three-phase service delivery model for this recruitment drive.

Video job advertisement

Social media algorithms favour videos over still content, so we create video advertisements for all vacancies to help source our candidates.

We take full advantage of this unique and highly effective form of candidate sourcing in order to reach the right candidate at the right time.

We post our videos on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. They are posted on these platforms 10-20 times, based on relevance. Our videos typically receive over 1,000 views within the first 24 hours.

Job advertisement

We constantly refresh, rewrite and reformat our job advertisements to optimise the quality of applications received. Our approach is aggressive - we post around 20 advertisements for every permanent job. Advertisements are posted on:

Job boards - Seek, Adzuna, Glassdoor, Indeed and Jora
Social media - LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
11 Recruitment's website

On average, our advertisements receive over 100 applications and perform well above the market benchmark for Seek, shown in this graph.

General Manager

Longstanding customer centered company with a family feel
Servicing the education - government - and private sectors
Role Based in WA Albany - January 2021 start

Retained Search

The role

As the General Manager, you will have a hands-on role within our clients business- developing and managing relationships to advance the company's goals of driving revenue and building partnerships.

This will entail building and nurturing relationships with clients as well as working to meet day-to-day service obligations. You will need to be resourceful, tenacious, responsive, solutions-oriented and proactive internally and externally.

The duties for this role will include:

Building strong business relationships and maintaining existing client relationships
Leading the sales operations team, managing and assigning technicians to projects and ensuring the team are engaged
Keeping abreast of the latest tools and best-practice techniques across the industry
Oversee project quotations and negotiations
Conducting quality reporting and auditing
Troubleshooting operational issues
Identifying strategic opportunities
Developing tender documents
Resolving client complaints - investigating problems, developing solutions, preparing reports and making recommendations
Managing stock and inventory
Being held responsible for the company's P&L and managing debit and creditors

About you

The successful candidate will have:

Previous Operations or General Manager experience
Experience working in a B2B sales environment
Demonstrable experience working with service level agreements
Previous printer and service industry experience (desired)
Excellent verbal communication and relationship building skills 
The ability to build relationships with internal and external stakeholders
The ability to think logically and to develop solutions
A valid driver's license
Provide a police clearance certificate

About our client

This is a great opportunity for someone looking to further their career within the printer and service industry with a leading office solutions provider.

Assessment Matrix design

Our in-house designed, custom made software generates an Assessment Matrix, which is our blueprint for the recruitment process. Our process consists of screening, interviews, document verification, skills testing, personality profiling and reference checks.

Ticks indicate the point at which each criteria is addressed. More importance criteria are checked multiple times throughout the recruitment process.

Selection criteria	Screen	Interview	Docs.	Profiling	Refs.
Education
Year 12	✓	✓	✓
Experience
Business to Business Sales Experience	✓	✓	✓		✓
Proven experience as operations or general manager	✓	✓			✓
Previous leadership experience	✓	✓			✓
Good understanding of service (maintenance) contracts	✓	✓			✓
Excellent negotiation skills	✓	✓			✓
Planning and scheduling experience	✓	✓			✓
Previous stakeholder management	✓	✓			✓
Previous printer and service industry experience (desired)	✓	✓			✓
IT computer skills (desired)	✓	✓			✓
Marketing knowledge and skills (desired)	✓	✓			✓
Stock and Inventory Control	✓	✓			✓
Budget (sales and P&L) management	✓	✓			✓
Debtors and Creditors management	✓	✓			✓
MS Office Intermediate to Advanced	✓	✓			✓
Other
Work location – Albany	✓	✓			✓
Verify LinkedIn CV vs CV submitted	✓	✓			✓
Accept expected salary ($100k plus super and vehicle)	✓	✓			✓
Previous warning of termination?	✓	✓			✓
Will you pass a drug test?	✓	✓			✓
Behaviour
Dominance - 60%		✓		✓
Influence - 55%		✓		✓
Steadiness - 27%		✓		✓
Compliance - 51%		✓		✓
Forms signed
Health / police check			✓
Signed document - tell the truth			✓
Docs verified
Driver’s licence	✓		✓
Citizen AU / NZ or PR	✓		✓
Medical Check	✓		✓
Probity Check	✓		✓

DISC profiling

Similar to people, jobs have their own behavioural profile that is based on duties, environment and communication. We create a profile for every job vacancy, enabling us to match an applicant's behaviour against that of a specific role.

We use DISC, which examines the following attributes:

Dominance - accomplishing results, the bottom line, confidence
Influence - persuading others, openness, dependability
Steadiness - cooperation, sincerity, dependability
Compliance - quality, accuracy, expertise

DISC profile - General Manager

This is a role which requires an individual who is fundamentally assertive, independent; task driven and can operate on their own without support from colleagues and management. The person will need to have the courage of their convictions and be comfortable with being accountable for their actions. They will need to be a fast paced and outgoing, comfortable with change, and able to adapt as required.

Furthermore the role will require a person who is goal focused and is motivated to achieve the desired outcomes, without significant management intervention or the guidance of rules and procedures.

The contradiction is that from time to time in order to perform their duties effectively, the individual may need to curb their independent tendencies and follow procedures and accept instructions from superiors.

read more...

The role requires someone who is able to direct others in order to get the job done. They need to have an eye for detail and ensuring that the job is done thoroughly and according to the process. They will however, need to have people working with them who are also thorough, when completing the detailed part of the job.

The person would need to be a fast paced ‘big picture’ style of individual who is not overly concerned with what people think of them. This type of person would need to have a resilient character, such that they can cope with the challenging aspects of the role that require strength of character and skill to adapt to do the job. That is not to say they would need to be unpleasant but rather simply be comfortable making what could be seen to be unpopular decisions.

One characteristic of the behaviour required for this position is that the person needs to be comfortable with responding quickly to work demands and to be adaptable and comfortable with change. There will be times when deadlines need to be met with little warning and the person will need to adapt themselves to these tight deadlines.

The person needs to be enthusiastic, energetic and confident with adapting to the changing environment and not being able to rigidly follow a process or procedure.

This role does not have a rigid structured set of rules determining what the individual is to perform on a daily basis. The role will require an individual who is capable of thinking on their feet and adjusting to the changing dynamics of the job in order to meet the requirements.

The type of person in the role will have to rely on experience and skill rather than process and will need to be confident of what they do in spite of the lack of guidance. By the same token the role requires someone who is fast paced and comfortable with a dynamically changing environment.

General Manager

Shortlisted candidates

Candidate A

Candidate B

Candidate C

Behavioural adaptation by candidates to match the job profile:

Candidate A

Candidate B

Candidate C

Results

Our aim is to produce a strong shortlist by sourcing widely. We measure every stage in our recruitment process to ensure we meet this key objective.

Our service comes with an extended 18-month replacement guarantee. This guarantee means our interests are mutually aligned - to recruit high achievers who will excel and stay.

Video views

1,188

Applications received

Interviewed by 11 Recruitment

Shortlisted

Interviewed by client

Hired