Recruiting new employees should feel like a relief. Fresh perspectives, new possibilities, and more balanced workloads. Although, if you’ve ever done recruiting, you probably know that it rarely works out that way.
What begins as an exciting endeavor to seek out that person whose presence will restore order to your over-encumbered and frantically busy team becomes a long, draining, slog of an effort.
If your recruiting efforts aren’t focused, brief, and fun, it’s time to reevaluate the way you recruit. There are several metrics that can help you assess your current process. For example, when was the last time you looked at your time to hire metric? And Is the number justifiable?
Harvard Business Review states that 80% of turnover can be attributed to bad hiring decisions. If you haven’t taken a step back and questioned your recruiting process, don’t waste any more time. Here are a few simple tips to help get you started.
Where to begin?
While it’s tempting to start at a point that elicits the most eye rolls (group interview scheduling! Background checks!), I recommend going back to square one.
No, not the first interview. The job posting.
You should start your recruiting process off on the right foot. The job posting should clearly and accurately outline what the job entails, what you are looking for, and what your organization values. The job posting should either excite people or provide them with enough detail to know that this isn’t for them.
Next Stop: The Interviews
First you’ll talk to HR, then to Accounting, then to the Sales team, then back to HR… wait, what? Jokes aside, this isn’t far off from reality.
There are a number of best practices that you’ll want to keep in mind when structuring interviews.
- Every interview should have a unique and defined purpose. Every interviewer should be prepared to probe a particular set of competencies.
- Interviewers should be aligned on what constitutes a good answer and a bad answer. We all bring our own perspectives to an interview, but it’s important to discuss and understand as a group what types of answers should be red flags, and what types of answers the organization is looking for.
- How do you decide when someone should go on to the next round or not? This will be unique to each organization, but it’s critical it’s addressed.
- Interview data should be passed from round to round. If you’re excited about a candidate and have green lit them for the next round, why you’re excited about that candidate should be passed on to the next interview in some form. Alternatively, you may not have had enough time to ask them about a certain skillset, and the next interviewer should be aware of that as well.
What else should be kept in mind?
Save your team and the candidate’s time by being transparent. For example, you may not want to reveal the salary upfront because it’s important to you that a candidate consider everything your company has to offer before they make their decision. That’s totally fair. However, you can give them a ballpark of the salary early in the process so they don’t proceed through a bunch of rounds only to realize that the salary is a deal breaker.
It sounds obvious, but it’s important to keep in mind: always remember that you should become more and more comfortable with the idea of this person joining your company as they proceed through interview rounds. If in later rounds you’re finding yourself catching red flags, or candidates are realizing that this isn’t for them, something is amiss.
Recruiting should be exciting and fun. This is an opportunity to showcase how great your company is, and to provide your peers with the support they need in a new hire. What are some of your best practices?
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