How To Get Your Boss To Let You Make a Change

You've done the research, you've made the plan and you're ready to make some changes to improve your hiring process. Only one problem, your boss said no. Let's change that narrative.

I've spoken a lot about how the quickest and most effective way to get more qualified applicants for your open positions is to write a better job ad, but what happens when your boss doesn't see things the same way? After hearing from a couple of HR professionals at my last event that they received push back, whether it be from their boss, hiring managers, or even peers, about rewriting a job ad, I decided to help out. I've written out three steps to help convince your boss to let you make a change in your processes.

While I'm using the example of changing up a job ad, these three steps could be used to approach your boss about changing up almost anything. How do I know this? Because I'm the CEO of a software company and I've broken down exactly how I would want my employees to pitch an idea to me.

Video: How to Convince Your Boss to Try New Things

1. Limit the scope of what you're asking for.

If you go in trying to rewrite all of your job ads, or even switch up your whole approach to hiring, your boss is probably going to get pretty nervous and shoot the idea down quickly.

So instead, limit yourself to only rewriting one of your company's job ads. If you want to take the idea one step further, limit your test to rewriting one of your job ads and only posting it to one job board while keeping the old job ad up for the rest.

This approach does two things for you, it limits the risk (we'll talk about that more later) for your company, and also allows you to create a sort of A/B test for the ads. Running an A/B – a test where you compare two versions of the same thing to see which performs better – also provides you with some hiring metrics to show what is working and what is not.

2. Limit the impact.

Like I mentioned in step one, you're going to want to start small. I tell my employees to "nail it, then scale it" which means perfect the process on at a small level, then once its "nailed down" we can scale it to produce larger numbers and better results.

For this example, ways you could limit the impact include only posting the new job ad to one job board while keeping the old job ad up everywhere else. You could also only change the job ad for one location, or even just let the new ad run for a few days and then revert back to the original.

The point is to just start small until you know what you're working with.

3. Limit the amount of risk.

The best way to help limit the risk for your boss, is to define out the entire process for them. When you approach your boss have all your ducks in a row and be able to tell them: here is what we are going to do, this is how we've limited it, here is how we are testing it and where we are testing it, we'll know its successful by XYZ, and the test will last approximately this long.

Come to your boss prepared with all this information and by setting up metrics for you to track and show your results. And finally tell them your next steps after you've ran the test. Tell them if the test is unsuccessful based on these metrics, we will revert back to the way we were doing things before. Or better yet, have a next phase of testing ready to go.

Following this process is going to show your boss that not only have you thought these changes through but that you've minimized the risk and have a plan in place if you don't get the desired results.

Now that you know how to convince your boss to let you make some changes to your job ad, check out ApplicantPro's Job Ad Rewriting service! And for a limited time, take $30 off your first rewrite by using coupon code: 8330.