Top 10 Hiring Tips
All highly successful companies have one thing in common; skilled, ambitious, responsible employees. Finding quality people to work at your company does not happen over night; in fact it can (or should) take months to fill one position with a trained and trusted candidate. Here are 10 hiring tips to help you find the right people and give them the tools to succeed in their positions that will help your business prosper.
- Always Looking
You should constantly be on the lookout for ways to attract and engage top talent, even if it’s not needed right now. Consider how much time, money and frustration you would save if you already had a pool of qualified, relevant and interested applicants on hand once a hiring need does open up. The effort you put in now to recruit for the future will lead to fewer hiring mistakes and a greater return for all involved in the hiring process. - Know What You Need.
Know the skills and personality traits that will make a person successful in a given job, so you can develop job descriptions when you’re hiring. This helps in framing interviews with potential applicants, who in turn learn in advance more about the skills needed for the position. - Have A Large Selection Pool.
Commit to interviewing a number of people, even though you probably won’t be interested in most of them. If you don’t think a person is a good fit for your company, use the interview to discover information on your competitors or create business development opportunity. - Ask The Right Questions.
Do not ask obvious questions like “are you going to be a responsible and efficient employee of this company?” Anyone can say yes to these types of questions. Probing questions should allow you to discover if the potential candidate possesses a positive attitude, can be trusted, has good character, takes responsibilities, confident, willing to follow instructions, and has a good track record and so on. Aside from the questions, you also need to assess their personality, self-esteem and attitude towards people and towards work through the manner of their speaking and their overall nonverbal behavior. - Check References.
Check references and do a criminal background check. You just can never be too sure. Even if your potential candidate looks innocent and sweet, looks can be deceiving and you want to be utmost sure that your employee has a clean record. - Clarify Expectations.
New employees seldom know exactly what is expected of them, how they will be measured, or with whom they will work the most. It’s important to communicate expectations and metrics clearly and succinctly from day one. - Attractive Salary.
If you want to hire excellent and efficient employees, you should be able to offer fair and attractive compensation. - Buddy System.
Consider a “buddy” system, that is, assign one of your long-time employees as a “buddy” to aid the new employee for his or her first few weeks at your company. Be sure not to “burn out” buddies by assigning too many new hires to them in succession. After the new employee has been with the company for at least a year, give them a chance to become a “buddy” in turn to the next wave of new hires. - Develop People To Their Full Potential.
This could be training to learn a new job skill or tuition reimbursement to help further your employee’s education. - Exit Interviews.
Exit interviews are one of the best ways to get true and honest feedback from employees. The downside is that it takes time to build up a significant amount of data from exit interviews. Increasing your participation rate with feedback in general, however, can help you get greater amounts of feasible information faster from your exit interviews.
Finding the right people for the job and training them can take a good deal of time and effort, but if you do take your time, do your homework, and follow this ten-step process, it will pay off! You can find hard-working and talented people who you can trust and that want to partner with your company and work for its success! Good luck!
Related: Positive Work Environment and Red Flags to Watch During the Interview