We all know that making bad hires is costly, both in terms of direct replacement costs and indirect “people” costs, including declining employee morale and eroding customer relationships. Having a structured process for defining requirements, evaluating candidates and mapping the two together is a good way to improve your chances of making a good hire. Here are some tips.
- Know what you want and don’t want. Develop a detailed job description, including both job specific and transferable or “soft” skills required for the role. What are the skills and competencies that have helped a “star” in that role succeed? What experiences and characteristics will help the ideal candidate succeed in your environment and culture? Also, consider the characteristics that would make a candidate less than ideal for the role or for your organization. A clear definition of what you want and don’t want will help you be more objective in your candidate assessments.
- Create and use a structured hiring process. Developing a repeatable process makes life easier for everyone – interviewers, candidates and those who are coordinating the meetings. It ensures objectivity (which will keep you legal!) and provides a good first impression for potential employees. Remember, you are “selling” the company to them as much as they are “selling” themselves to you.
- Ask behavioral questions. Getting the candidate to describe a specific example of how they demonstrated a skill or behaved in a certain situation will give you more insight than hypothetical “how would you…” questions. Build the questions around the skills and competencies defined in the job description. And ask the same questions of every candidate for the role so you have a consistent basis of comparison. There are plenty of books and websites that provide canned answers for behavioral questions so follow up with some probing questions for more detail.
- Train your interviewers. Too often interviewers are handed a resume and asked to interview a candidate without any preparation or training. That’s unfair to both the interviewer and the candidate, and could lead to legal issues if the interviewer asks an illegal question or treats one candidate differently than the others. No one should interview candidates unless they’ve been trained in interviewing best practices and legal/illegal questions. Also, each interviewer should be prepared, in advance, to ask specific questions of each candidate for the role. That prevents candidates from being asked the same questions by five different people! After the interviews, convene the interviewers to share input on the candidates.
- Check references. How many stories have we read about credentials that were fudged or experience that was bloated? Yes, checking references takes time, but may save you money and/or embarrassment in the long run.
- Embrace diversity. It’s a well-known fact that people tend to hire people who are like them. In theory, that would accelerate the acclimation process, but in practice it may not be the best solution for the team. A better option is to look for diversity of thought, skills and experience that will complement existing viewpoints, skills and experience to achieve organizational success. Someone once said, “if both of us think exactly alike, one of us is unnecessary.”
If you need help putting together a structured hiring process, please contact me.