Depending on your approach, hiring new people can either be an exciting undertaking or a tedious exercise of resume reading, interviewing, and evaluating. In either case, there are risks involved.
If you hire someone who is overqualified for a position or who is simply not a good fit for your company’s culture, they may not stay long, and you’ll find yourself back at square one. Meanwhile, if you hire someone underqualified, they may not live up to expectations and you may have to let them go.
The importance of employing the right person for the right position is a fact long recognized by business owners. People are the most crucial component of your business since they affect how you work, how you promote yourself to customers, and how successful you are. Hiring the right person makes all the difference.
There’s no one best way to hire people, but here are 10 tips on how to hire the right employee for your business — or at the very least, reduce the possibility of a poor hire.
- Write detailed job descriptions
To get the right person in the right job, you need to start by carefully defining the job. It is good to remember that a generic job advertisement will produce generic outcomes. Be as specific as possible. Most job postings start with the job title, and then work backward to determine the prerequisites and responsibilities.
Ask team members who will be working most closely with this recruit about their understanding of their function and what they look for in the individual who will fill it. You can also ask a departing employee how well they felt their position aligned with the initial job description. You can use job analysis to gather information on a job’s roles, responsibilities, required skills, outcomes, and work environment. These sources are likely to provide you with useful information to make your job descriptions more detailed.
- Understand how the candidate’s goals align with the job
Give importance to how you see the position evolving over the next few years when you write the job description for the position. What role does your ideal applicant play in your company’s expansion strategy?
It’s vital that you have a clear picture of how the ideal employee evolves in the role you’re hiring for, as well as an awareness of the possible candidates’ professional objectives and aspirations. Getting a sense of both attributes can help you assess whether your job applicant and the company’s aims are aligned.
- Consider your company culture
The number one reason new hires don’t stick around is a lack of cultural fit, so make sure your interviews go beyond determining technical proficiency or industry experience to assess company fit as well.
Consider your corporate culture, or at least the one you’d like to establish. Due to an increasingly remote workforce, certain characteristics are deemed more valuable, such as self-motivation, independence, solid organization skills, and proactive communication. Create interview questions to help you assess these qualities in a candidate.
- Avoid concentrating on their past
While it’s critical to properly screen potential candidates, there’s a distinction to be made between making sure you have a good idea of their work style and capabilities versus getting too caught up in the details.
You don’t need to hyper-focus on their previous experiences; that’s what resumes are for. Instead of repeating information, move the emphasis of the interview to how they would solve challenges that would arise on the job, as well as determining their potential. Ask open-ended questions that are relevant to the role. People should be hired for their potential, not just their past accomplishments.
- Use other evaluation strategies beyond a face-to-face interview
While interviewing is still a component of the hiring process, in-person interviews aren’t always the ideal way to assess someone’s genuine personality and abilities, especially for easily anxious people. Beyond analyzing resumes and conducting a few rounds of interviews, it may be necessary to add certain evaluation strategies.
Consider putting in place a testing phase. Place recruits on probation with the understanding that if they do not meet expectations, they will be dismissed.
- Pay attention to the questions they ask
A smart candidate asks intelligent questions during the interview process. This demonstrates the candidate’s readiness and enthusiasm, which is always a positive indicator.
Think about the interview more as a dialogue than a question-and-answer session, in which both you and your potential applicant ask each other questions to determine compatibility. The greatest hires are concerned about the team they’ll be part of, who will be in charge of them, and how they can contribute to the success of your firm.
- Invite the whole group to the video chat
How do you know for sure if the person is a good fit for your company? Holding a group video call with a candidate and the current staff is one strategy to obtain some approval. A group video chat could be a good test run, especially if your team members will be working via Zoom, Slack, or other communications platforms in the near future.
Ask current team members to prepare a few questions they’d like to ask the new candidate, vet and prepare them to give the interview a logical flow, and then invite those current team members to introduce themselves as they ask one of their questions.
- Think if you could work for them if the roles were reversed
This may be something that not all recruiters think about, but it is worth considering. Ask yourself whether or not your potential hire is someone with whom you would feel at ease and confident working. To put it another way, “Would you be willing to work for this individual if he is your boss?” If you answered yes, they would most likely be a good employee.
- Be very transparent about your expectations
If you’re still in the initial stages of your business, it’s critical to be open and honest with potential employees about the challenges ahead. They may end up taking on multiple responsibilities and going above and beyond to help you get your business off the ground in the beginning, It’s critical to assess whether or not your prospective candidate is up to the task.
Candidates will be able to evaluate for themselves whether or not they are a suitable fit if the information is provided upfront. Those who can’t are more likely to drop out of the process, but those who are ready to take on a challenge persevere and become some of my most valuable employees.
- Always trust your instincts
The simple truth is that no matter how many tests they take, how many interviews you conduct, or how many questions you ask, it all boils down to one thing: what does your gut tell you? While it may be tempting to make your hires based solely on your rational decisions, it’s critical that you also take into consideration a candidate whom you feel will be a good fit on a gut level. Throughout the recruiting process, ignoring your instincts can ultimately backfire and cause you to lose a good candidate.
Your business can expect plenty of benefits from hiring the right person. Are you ready to start finding and recruiting the right person for the job? While this is not a comprehensive list, this is a good place to start.
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