If you’re not getting the right candidates to apply to your job posting, if you’re making too many hiring mistakes, or if your new hires aren’t sticking around for the long term, you might need to re-tool your hiring process.
Your hiring process is critical to ensuring a strong workforce, and ultimately, to ensuring the success of your business. Use these tips to improve it.
1. Know Your Ideal Candidate
Before you go out looking for candidates, you need to know who you’re actually seeking out. Don’t write the job description so haphazardly. Spend some time to consider the must-have position requirements, including the experience, education, skills, knowledge, and attitudes that you’re looking for. Then develop an ideal candidate profile that matches what you’re seeking in a new employee.
Once you know who you’re looking for, you’ll have a roadmap to follow when evaluating each candidate. You’ll be able to see who will be the best fit. Beware, though, not to create a candidate profile that’s out of this world. Make your requirements realistic or you might get top candidates disqualifying themselves because your needs are too specific and outrageous.
2. Test Candidates
People lie on their resumes more often than you might expect. And interviews can be tricky—you could easily get fooled by someone’s charm. If you want to ensure that someone actually has the skills that he says he has, test him on it. If you’re hiring for sales, have a mock sales call during the interview. If the administrative position requires fast typing skills, get candidates to perform a typing test. If you’re hiring a graphic designer, give candidates homework to create an ad.
The tests don’t need to be elaborate, but they can really help differentiate those with the necessary skills with those who aren’t right for the job. Plus, they can weed out the candidates who aren’t really serious about the position.
3. Make It a Team Decision
You should never hire someone on your own. Realize it or not, your opinion might be wrong and it might be biased. You might like one candidate better than another simply because his personality matches yours, even if he’s not the best fit for the job.
Include others in the hiring process. Let them sit into the interview—particularly the people who the new hire will be interacting with regularly. You’ll be able to benefit from the additional perspectives.
4. Avoid Rush Hiring
Many managers make the mistake of rushing to hire. Even though there are consequences to keeping positions open for too long, you could end up wasting a lot of time, money, and resources on bad hires because you hired too quickly. Take the necessary time to write a compelling job ad, to look over all resumes, to perform as many interviews as needed, and to get everyone’s opinion on the matter.
5. Always Be Recruiting
It’s a common pitfall among hiring managers: they only start looking for candidates once a position opens up. But if you do this, you could end up choosing the wrong candidate simply because the right one hasn’t come along yet and you need to fill the empty position immediately.
If you’re always recruiting, even when you don’t currently have open roles to fill, you’ll be able to build a database of qualified candidates to call on once a positon does open up. Your hiring process will be more strategic and thoughtful this way and you’ll be able to ensure that you’re not hiring the wrong person just to fill a void.
If your company’s hiring process isn’t producing the desired effects that you were hoping for, consider working with a staffing agency to ensure quality hires. Contact Liberty Staffing to get started.
