Hiring the wrong people can cost your business a tremendous amount of money. Your employees are collectively the single most important aspect of your institution, and your ability to screen and hire the proper candidates will ultimately mean the difference between the success or failure of your organization. Below are some tips that will allow you to recruit the best talent, while avoiding the problems will cost you huge sums of money and reduce your productivity.
Make Sure Your Job Description is Clear
Many ads for job descriptions are vague, giving the impression that the hiring manager doesn’t know what the organization wants. This leads to confusion on the part of the applicants, who will hope they can figure out the job once they’ve been hired. Naturally, this doesn’t work and it ultimately results in recruiting the wrong people. Make sure your job description is crystal clear about what the job entails, as well as the type of applicant you’re looking for and the requirements they must meet. Spending the extra time to spell out non-generic duties is worth it.
Use Your Network as a Recruiting Source
Any business which has grown large enough to begin hiring employees should have a network, one it can use to find good talent. The advantage of using a network for recruiting is that it’s faster, more efficient and more cost effective than using traditional ads. With websites like Facebook, LinkedIn and many others, there is no reason why recruiters shouldn’t be networking to find new candidates.
Avoid Asking Generic Questions
Interviewing applicants face-to-face is often the most ineffective stage of the hiring process. The reason for this is because of the type of questions which are usually asked. Asking a candidate about his or her strengths or weaknesses is meaningless because anyone can lie about that, or tell you whatever they think you want to hear. The most effective questions to ask during interviews are those that are designed to see how a potential candidate would respond to a given situation. These questions should be structured in such a way where the candidate won’t tell you what you want to hear, because they won’t know what it is.
Set up a Reference Call
This technique involves the job recruiter asking the candidate if it’s okay to perform a reference call between them and the candidate’s previous employer. This technique will scare away most C-level candidates because for one, most of them won’t be able to get their former bosses on a reference call and they also won’t be comfortable with such an arrangement.
The reference call technique allows recruiters to weed out undesirable candidates before they enter the company and cause significant losses. A-level candidates won’t have any problem getting a hold of previous employers, since those employers enjoyed working with them. Second, A-level candidates are confident in their abilities and won’t be scared away by having to do a reference call between the recruiter and their former employer.
The global marketplace has become too competitive to leave hiring good employees to chance. Companies both large and small must enact screening procedures to only recruit those individuals who will add value to their organization, rather than taking it away.
– By Mona West
Mona worked for one of the biggest contract recruiting firms in Kansas City for 4 years until she quit and decided to start exploring her other passion, writing. She is preparing an e-book on how to be spotted by headhunters. She also writes for several blogs.