Your employees are the heart and soul of your business, and their skills, desire, knowledge and motivation are critical to the overall success of your operation. Anytime you have an available job opening in higher or lower level positions in your firm, you must adopt a thoughtful hiring strategy. This strategy will help you to easily locate and hire the best professionals for your openings.
Many hiring managers feel as though they have a good handle on the process, but some also find it difficult to identify and attract top talent for their positions. With a closer look at how to develop your strategy, you can more successfully bring skilled talent into your organisation with minimal time and effort required.
Develop the Job Description
Before you can post a job listing ad online or contact a recruiter, you must develop the job description. This will define all the duties and responsibilities of the position. It also will define which skills and education level the successful candidate will have. It may be best to ask those who will be working closely with the new worker to provide input in these areas. These are workers who are intimately familiar with the duties that you need to be completed, and their insight can help you to better develop an accurate job description.
Take note that the job description should not be listed in its entirety on the ad. The purpose of the ad is to encourage interest from top candidates. Therefore, while you want to create an ad that discourages unqualified candidates from submitting a resume, the ad should also sell the position and get the right people excited about it. The description can be provided to candidates during the interview process.
If we consider that the job market is no different from the consumer market, with the addendum that the job you’re offering is the product, data gains a new importance. A data-driven recruitment process matches the best candidates for the job with the ad regarding it. This means that people who use LinkedIn, for example, and match your search parameters, will see your add. By doing so, you will reach exactly the people you want to hire and your chances of finding the perfect candidate increase exponentially.
Determine the Compensation Structure
A great compensation package is one of the primary things most job applicants look for in a new position. Most have a desire to earn as much or more than they earned in their last position. Even though there are many
online salary guides that candidates can visit before applying, an effective job listing should always discuss compensation in some manner. While it may not list the actual salary, it may list that health insurance, a retirement plan and other benefits are included.
Because you do not want to waste your time trying to interview those who expect more money than you are willing to offer, it is wise to ask for a salary history in a cover letter or otherwise to verbally discuss the compensation offered through this position over the phone when setting up the interview. This will ensure that all parties are on the same page going into the interview and will help you to avoid interviewing those who are not actually interested in the position.
Develop a Hiring Rubric
While you definitely want to hire a professional with a winning personality and ample charisma, you do not want to base your entire hiring decision on this factor. As part of your hiring strategy, consider developing a rubric that you can use to judge things such as education, skills, experience, other qualifications, interest in the position and more. You should develop a rubric before you begin reviewing resumes.
The rubric should have details on it regarding how to eliminate resumes from consideration as well as steps to take during a phone interview and different levels of the hiring process. This rubric will serve as your guide, so consider creating a scoring system to use with the rubric. Staple a copy of the rubric to each resume that you are considering, and begin scoring resumes right away to more easily make a thoughtful hiring decision.
Identify and Screen the Candidates
It is important to understand that hiring functions on a market basis as well. For that reason, you will need an ideal candidate model and well-defined search parameters. Alternatively, you can create an employee model after a top talent already working for your company and use it to search candidates.
Today, data exists in quantities never seen before, the only question being how to effectively sift through it. Making use of the data provided by your current employees is a smart way of backtracking. By looking at where they worked previously, the schools they attended or the specialisation they took, you will be able to identify a wide talent pool ripe for hiring.
Having established an ideal-case candidate and a talent pool, you can use a Boolean method of analysis to start searching. Simplified, this means that for the data you gather – information regarding candidates – only two variables are possible: true or false. Make use of this method to organise and label each candidate considered for hiring.
Even before setting an interview, a few data sets should be considered. Some of the most relevant ones are present-to-interview rates, interview-to-offer rates and acceptance rates. Recruiting agencies store this kind of information about anyone who uses their services. Each of the three data sets gives insight to the kind of employee you are looking at.
The Interview
Some hiring managers will base their decision based on the interview alone. However, there are many other stages of the hiring process that should also be analysed and graded. For example, did the individual follow all instructions on the job listing, such as providing a salary history with a cover letter? Was the cover letter free of typos and professionally written? Did the individual answer the phone professionally when you called? Did he or she speak clearly on the phone and express interest in the position? Did you ask a few phone
screening questions, and were these answers satisfactory? You should develop phone screening questions as well as numerous questions for the interview itself. While you may want a few general questions that you ask all candidates, you should also prepare for the interviews ahead of time by creating customised questions based on the resume that you received.
It can be helpful for multiple people in your office to interview the professionals on the same day. While you do not want to waste time by having multiple people interview a candidate you are not seriously considering, it can also be helpful to have a fresh perspective from different people. If you plan to conduct a lengthy interview, let the applicant know ahead of time how many different interviews he or she will have during the day so that ample time can be allocated for the interview.
Conduct a Thorough Background Check
A final and important step in the hiring process is to conduct a background check. This step likely will cost your office money if you have a professional do the work for you. With this in mind, it is not advisable to conduct a background check on anyone who you are not ready to extend an offer to immediately.
You may even draft the offer letter contingent on the individual passing the background check. The check should review the individual’s educational background, work history, certifications, salary history, credit rating, criminal background and other related factors.
The best candidate to hire will pass the check with flying colours. Some issues, such as a felony, may be an automatic no for your company. Other factors, such as a late payment on a credit card give years ago, may be overlooked with an explanation. It is easy to talk yourself into hiring someone who you feel passionately about. Therefore, always know what your cutoff limits are regarding the background check before you learn more about the applicant.
The right hiring strategy can help you to more quickly and easily identify which candidate you want to extend an offer to. However, even in the best cases, it may still take weeks or months to find the right professional to hire.
