For human resource personnel or recruiters, it has always been challenging to hire the right person for the right job. Hiring the wrong candidate is not only a waste of resources, but also time-consuming. Whereas getting the right hire can help boost your company’s productivity and create a positive impact on your business.
Recruitment is about managing expectations from different stakeholders, as you’ll be judged on your hiring decision, and obviously you can’t please everyone in the company. So, how can employers get the right hires despite the stress and great amount of applicants to choose from? Here are some helpful hiring tips you can use to hire the right person for your company:
1. Define job scope before hiring
Before you start your hiring process, make sure you have all the important information such as the job description, specific skill set required, job location, and work environment of the position. It’s fundamental to have all the job requirements clearly mentioned in all job ads as it outlines the requirements clearly to potential candidates. That’s how you can attract the right candidates who can fulfill all your requirements.
2. Review applications thoroughly
Once you started to receive job applications, the next step is to review their resumes as thoroughly as possible as you don’t want to miss out on any important details. Create a checklist of desired characteristics, skills, qualification, experience and so on, so that you can filter the applicants accordingly. Then, you can screen and categorize all applicants against this list and further narrow down to your most qualified candidates.
By doing so, you can spend your time effectively on the high potential candidates instead of wasting time on candidates who don’t fit the requirements.
3. Ask the right interview questions
An interview is your chance as an employer to decide whether or not the applicant is a good fit for the role, your team and your company culture in general. However, you can only get these important information by asking the right questions.
Make a short list of questions that can tell you what you need to know about an applicant as quickly as possible and at the same time, help you to separate high potential candidates from the average ones.
4. Do your background checks
When hiring an employee, it’s vital to conduct background checks to ensure all the presented skills, credentials, and work experiences are real and not fabricated. The checks should include work references, particularly former bosses, certifications, proof of employment, and any criminal or health history. You won’t want to take the risk of bringing someone untrustworthy into the company and cause any potential issues in the future.
5. Check compatibility
You want to hire someone who can blend in well with your company’s culture. It’s crucial to look into the candidate’s social skills and personality traits to tell if he or she can get along well with the rest. You can get a pretty gauge of someone’s personality by asking the right questions such as the way they interact with colleagues ot how they resolve issues at work.
Hire a candidate who has the willingness to learn and the positive attitude at work. If he or she can’t get along with others and it’s always other people’s fault when things go wrong, you should think twice about hiring such a candidate.
6. Get on social media
Perhaps it’s not a good idea to ask questions about the candidate’s personal life during the interview. Both parties might find it awkward or worse the candidate might get turn off by such questions. Instead, you should utilize the power of social media nowadays to find out more about the potential candidates. A person’s online presence can tell a lot about his or her personality and this is a very useful tool, especially if you are hiring for tech industry.
You’ll surprised by how much you can find out about the candidate by researching their online presence on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
7. Hire and groom your interns
Some might think that grooming interns is too time-consuming, but this is one of the best ways to get the right person for the right job. Interns are like a piece of blank canvas who are highly trainable. You already know their strengths, weaknesses, and work attitude. Basically you have all the answers for every job interview question you have in my mind, so why not find someone from this pool when you are looking for people to fill permanent roles?
8. Speed up the hiring process
Frankly, many high potential candidates turn down job offers as other companies have reached out to them. Hiring process which appears to be unnecessarily long should be restructured or improved to prevent good candidates from losing interest or being snatched away by other companies. After all, best practices in all fields should always be updated and hence change from time to time.
Find these tips useful? We have more career advice, workplace tips, and job search tips on our blog. Don’t forget to check them out!
Image: Pexels