Make The Hire Count
Friday, February 28, 2020 by julie
Every business has a uniqueness due to culture, organization structure, tenets, practices, and goals. Competition is everywhere, opportunities for growth abound, challenges are multiple, and technology is forever changing. A key to business success is improving productivity with less effort and resources. People are the backbone of all organizations and bad hires cost a business financially, productively, and emotionally. Roles do not always have equal value in parallel businesses. There are three levels of value with a lot of degrees of separation: strategic, tactical, and maintenance. Competition for talent has increased and hiring effectively means both correctly and quickly.
Here are a few suggestions when recruiting, evaluating, and hiring a new employee:
Identify a small team of decision makers: Less people involved is quicker and more efficient. Often companies preach being proactive, forward thinking, and customer focused and then effuse a hiring process that is cumbersome and too lengthy.
Develop a time line: Assume that the best candidates are being recruited by other companies and will not be available for long. Best practices means being efficient. Establish a time line for first and second interviews to move through the evaluation process as quickly as possible. Try avoiding more than a 2 step process. This is a positive message to all parties.
Create a scorecard: The hiring team must all be on the same page regarding responsibilities, value of role, ability to contribute, and first year expectations. Go beyond the job description and create a score sheet of core competencies that include knowledge, experience, and soft skills that are essential. Not all items on the score sheet are equal. Identify how the team is going to evaluate items on the score card. Meet after interview and discuss scoring.
Ask interesting questions: Behavioral interview is quite common and viewed to be 5060% predictive of future performance. Be premeditated and create questions that are aligned to the score card. Ensure that hard and soft skills, knowledge, experience, and acumen are appropriately evaluated. Believe it or not, there are hiring authorities that do not ask questions, end up talking too much, and then wonder why the new hire did not meet expectations.
Be prepared to sell: All candidates need to feel positive following the interview process even if they are not the candidate of choice. If a candidate warrants future interest, leadership needs to sell the opportunity, culture, synergies, business future and any other positive insight. This is the “pull” factor and essential to securing talent.
