Naturally, you want to hire great people for all of your departments. When you hire top talent, you have a chance to streamline your business operations and generate more revenue.
Luckily, you have a hiring process in place that you follow in order to weed out the bad so you’re only left with top talent. Unluckily, your hiring process might not be working as effectively as you want it to. The fact is hiring isn’t as easy as it seems. There are many steps in a hiring process—skip just one step or do it wrong and you’ll have yourself some new duds at your office.
Fortunately, if you assess your hiring process and find out why it’s failing, you can take steps towards fixing it so you can get back on track and hire some great new employees. To get you started, here are five reasons why you might be hiring all wrong.
You Don’t Know Who Your Ideal Hire Is
Your hiring process should be focused on your ideal hire. All of the steps you take should get you closer to hiring that perfect candidate. But if you don’t know who that is, you’re going to have a hard time finding him. Before you start posting ads, you need to determine who exactly you’re targeting with your efforts. This includes determining what necessary skills, education, performance level, and experience level you’re looking for as well as which assets you’d appreciate your candidates to have. Hiring someone who’s under-qualified or even overqualified isn’t ideal.
Hanging Out at All the Wrong Places
Once you know exactly who you’re looking for, you need to know how to find them. If you’re not choosing the right communication channels to target your ideal candidates, you’re not going to get your recruitment message across effectively. You want to increase the probability of your targets coming across your job opportunities. This can include using job boards, social media, word-of-month, signage, your website, or other channels that your ideal candidates might see.
Forgetting about Passive Candidates
It’s easier to communicate your opportunities to active candidates—they’re actively looking for employment so they’re actually searching for opportunities. If you advertise on job boards, this group is likely to see it. However, your hiring process might be failing if you’re ignoring passive candidates simply because they’re harder to reach. Passive candidates aren’t looking for employment, but they might jump at an opportunity if it came along. Because they’re already employed, you can more easily assess their skills and experience, which makes them better candidates.
You’re Not Screening
You should only be spending your time interviewing a small percentage of qualified applicants. To weed out the ones that aren’t worth your time, you need to screen resumes to see who meets minimum qualifications for the job, who is over exaggerating or lying to get ahead, and even who might be a security or safety risk. If you’re not taking the time to properly screen resumes, perform background checks, and call up references, you risk hiring the wrong candidates.
Not Hiring for Fit
Skills and experience are important, sure. Your new hires should be able to perform their duties correctly and efficiently. However, that’s not all you should be looking for during the hiring process. If you’re seeing many of your new employees quitting after only a few weeks or months, you’re probably not hiring for fit. To ensure that you’re hiring the right people, you also need to figure out if they fit with your company culture—with your business goals, processes and procedures, and environment.
