It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do as a business leader, if you can’t leverage your vision through a core of talented employees, then your business will not build the momentum you need to take it to the next level.
Unfortunately, while most leaders understand the value of talent management, they fail to implement the right recruitment systems to get the best people onboard. This is because it’s not easy to find the right people. Resumes are more like sales letters written by professional resume writers than a true account of a person’s job history and many candidates are coached to say what you want to hear during an interview.
On the job, surprising things can happen, too. Promising candidates with highly technical skills may disappoint in their work ethic while those who just managed to make the cut might turn out to be your best employees. Hiring the right person is time-consuming, costs money, and can be a tricky feat to accomplish.
Here are 5 ways to create an effective hiring process:
- Create accurate job descriptions.
If the wrong candidates show up for the job, it might simply be because they don’t know that they are the wrong candidates. Your liberal job description generalized what was needed to such an extent that almost anyone could see themselves as qualified.
Another mistake is doing just the opposite, with the result that you get too few candidates. It’s a mistake to make the job description so detailed that most people don’t feel qualified to live up to your idealized expectations.
Here are 3 ways to write a better job description:
- Describe the job in a realistic way without hyping its benefits or focusing on your ideal candidate.
- Blend a call for technical skills with a quick description of complementary skills that would be useful on the job.
- Focus on what your company can do to enrich your candidate’s career.
- Make your company information easy to research.
Your website should be written in plain English, not marketing hype or corporate jargon. There should also be more than enough information about the nature of your business for people to decide whether they resonate with your corporate culture. Often in an attempt to keep things short and sweet, websites can become a little cryptic. By offering plenty of information about your company, candidates will have a much better idea of what it is that you do and don’t do.
- Interview for soft skills, too.
Many interviews focus on an employee’s credentials and their past work history. The idea is to avoid hiring someone who is not qualified to do the job. While this is an essential part of the interview process—you don’t want to hire a network engineer who has only done a few home study courses to manage your IT department – you also want to make sure that the person has the right soft skills, too. In your quest to discern your candidate’s social intelligence, you need to ask questions that give you a better idea of how they think, their emotional maturity, and their interpersonal communication skills.
- Take personality into account.
Besides technical skills and soft skills, personality makes a huge difference. Some jobs require an empathetic personality, others a proactive, hands-on type, and yet others, an extroverted personality. The person you hire for one particular job may have a personality that fits much better into another type of job available in your company. For instance, hiring an extrovert for the job of filing clerk, which requires a high element of introversion and interest in minute details, might not work out but the candidate would be a perfect fit for your sales team because he is a natural people person.
- Improve how you do your interviews.
While it’s possible to restrict the interview to a standardized set of questions and rely on intuition about the candidate’s forthrightness in answering the questions, your interviews can be much more useful.
While it’s fine to ask the question you need, you should also go beyond the traditional interview format and include the following 3 elements:
- 1. Ask questions that give you an idea about the candidate’s motivation, temperament, intellectual and emotional intelligence, and coachability.
- 2. Follow your intuition by asking questions that are not on your list of topics to cover. For instance, you might ask questions about where someone imagines they will be in the next 10 years.
- 3. Allow candidates to interview you back. When candidates ask you questions, you can quickly grasp what’s important for them. By empowering your candidates to understand the job position better, it will give both of you a chance to figure out if the job is a good fit. Be honest about your company and realistic about what it will be to work in your organization; otherwise, you’re only setting up your future employee to become disengaged or find a way to leave as soon as possible.
As a business leader, you’re constantly under pressure to perform, but you won’t get far with a brilliant strategy if you don’t hire the right people to do the work that needs to be done. To be successful at steering your ship of enterprise, you need an able a crew capable of understanding directions and willing to follow through on orders. Using these 5 techniques will help you pick the right crew members.