The hiring process should be streamlined, with reduced bias, and should always lead to better hiring decisions. It is important to acknowledge how your business communicates its brand, culture, and available opportunities when seeking new talent to join its ranks. In turn, it will get the attention of candidates with the right set of skills for the role that needs to be filled. Now, how can you create a strategic recruiting process? It takes several efforts to make your business’s recruiting strategy to be one that can identify the perfect candidate for an open position.
First, you need to identify which skills, attributes, and traits are the ones you are seeking from that ideal candidate. You can seek people who are driven, smart, show initiative, and eager to learn. Attributes like these are essential for a long-term employee that can boost your business productivity. Even so, these qualities aren’t necessarily tied to the years of experience of these potential candidates, there is no correlation between years of experience and good job performance. Nevertheless, you must keep in mind there is no true, all qualifying potential employees. So be mindful of which of these attributes you seek is required the most for a job well done. It could be that this person is capable of reducing a key workload you have by being timely and attentive to detail. Another variation could be that they have core values that match those of your business, which allows them to be a versatile employee that meets the requirements of a variety of roles.
One key effort when identifying top talent is reference checking, as cliché as it sounds, do check for the references in the résumé submissions of potential talent. They serve as an additional lens for choosing the ideal candidate. Check online the veracity of prior employer locations and services, résumé embellishment is real, and it is important to make sure to week out the bad apples. If you can, take a moment to contact the references, it will give you the clarity you need on this person’s attributes and traits. Although, tread carefully if the person is still employed and is looking to transition careers, involving the current employer may raise the likelihood of having to compete with a counteroffer from them. Have your best recruiters be the ones tackling employee reference contacting.
Another way to effectively screen candidates is to have an initial screening interview of the candidate, this being after narrowing down the pool of applicants. Call them for a brief screening (15 to 30 minutes max). Ask basic “get to know you” questions and dive into what skills they have. Afterward, do a final round of interviews, this time these are in person (or by video conference if hiring remotely). At this point, your questions should be more focused and in-depth. It’s good to throw some curveballs, unusual questions will get candidates to open up, thus giving you better insight into how they think and act. Having more than one person in the room doing the interview process, two minds can assess more accurately if the candidates will be a good fit for the role and the business overall. Make the most of this moment by having the applicant perform an assessment task, be it a quick demo, an editing exercise, or a short written piece. Anything that can make it easy to test whether the candidate can perform a responsibility of the role.
As you can see, there are several ways in which your business can make the necessary changes to fine-tune processes for seeking the quality talent it wants. Quality talent in the end has to align with your business’s needs and values. There are more layers to these hiring processes, such as designing a strong employer brand along with a strategic job posting and résumé screening system. Stay tuned for interesting blogs like these!
~F. Hernandez