How to Hire the Right Employee Every Time (Part 1)
3 tips on improving and streamlining your hiring process
Lisa B. Marshall
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How to Hire the Right Employee Every Time (Part 1)
How much time have you spent thinking about and dealing with employees who are not doing their job well or need constant and close supervision? The management costs of hiring mistakes may be far greater than you think.>
Bad Hires Harm Your Company
What if you found out that one mistake was responsible for 80% of your employee turnover issues? According to Harvard researchers, that mistake has been uncovered: it is the hiring process. Traditional interviews, which are often unstructured and one-on-one, are poor predictors of employee performance on the job. Bad hiring decisions happen when managers are unprepared, uninformed, or too subjective. In the end, poor hiring decision result in poor performance for the company.
Unfortunately, most interviewers are not good at interviewing. Often if an interviewer doesn’t like someone, they won’t get hired; competency is irrelevant. And if an interviewer likes someone, incompetency is overlooked. Most interviewers, despite best intentions, favors people similar to themselves and often make a decision within the first five minutes.
Here are 3 Quick and Dirty Tips to hire the right employee the first time and every time:
Tip #1: Develop Written Job Descriptions
Take time to write or revise detailed job descriptions. If you don’t know what you really want or you want every possible skill in one person, you won’t be able to screen and evaluate your candidates properly. Each time you need to make a hire, craft a simple, practical, complete description of a realistic job for one person. That will suffice as your external job specification.
However, for your internal description, be sure to expand it to include a list of skill sets that are must haves, should haves, and nice to haves. Also consider what values will be important to be a good fit with your team. The key is to have a balanced job description that is specific enough to meet immediate needs, but not so overly narrow that it limits you ability to find people who are creative problem-solvers and who have the ability to tackle new challenges.
Written job descriptions help you concretely identify what you currently want and need to support the rest of your team. They also help hiring managers and recruiters to assist you in the screening process.
Tip #2: Create an Applicant Screening Process
By creating a screening process you can efficiently and effectively narrow down the candidate pool.
Screening should always begin with telephone interviews. Yes, interviews with an s, as in more than one. By the way, with most candidates, I prefer to start with a text chat just to quickly check their off-the-cuff written communication skills and to get a sense of their professionalism. If all goes well, then I turn on the video camera to continue the interview.
The purpose behind an initial telephone or video conversation is to determine if the candidate would be a good fit for the company culture, to gauge his or her interest and fit for the company and the position, and to evaluate his or her communication skills.
Next, choose the best candidates and schedule a second telephone interview with the hiring manager to determine if the candidate’s skills and experiences are a solid match for the position. Consider, using pre-employment assessment and testing to validate skills. Today there are many tools available that test technical skills, intellectual abilities in general, and personality traits. Testing helps you gain information that might not typically be available during an interview and using the test results has been found to improve hiring decisions. Finally, the hiring manager should also screen to determine if the candidate will mesh with the rest of the team and fit into the overall office culture. If not, there is no point bringing the candidate in for an in-person interview.
Tip #3 Use Behavioral-Based Questions
During the entire process, be sure to ask candidates to provide specific and detailed examples of work behavior, skills, and results that are important to the position. Proponents of behavioral-based interviewing suggest that the best predictor of future behavior is past performance, so it only makes sense to ask about the past. The idea is to create several questions that help you understand the skills and abilities that you require on your must have and should have lists.
For example, if working effectively in a team is an important skill for this position, then create 3 or 4 behavior-based team questions. For example: “Explain how you worked with someone outside of your department to accomplish a goal,” or “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a co-worker who wasn’t doing his or her fair share of the work?” Questions like these are far more revealing than “Tell me about your experience working on a team.”
When candidates respond to behavioral questions, interviewers can then probe deeper with “tell me more” or “why did you do that?” gathering more revealing information on which to base a hiring decision. In the past I have used a document created by the North Carolina Office of State Personnel to help me to first define the skills and abilities that are important to the job and then develop behavioral-based questions for each of the skill sets. (I posted the document to my blog if you’d like to take a look.)
Next week we’ll pick up from here with 4 more tips to help you improve your hiring process. This is Lisa B. Marshall, The Public Speaker, passionate about communication. Your success (and the success of your candidates) is my business.
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About the Author
Lisa B. Marshall Lisa holds masters with duel degrees in interpersonal/intercultural communication and organizational communication. She’s the author of Smart Talk: The Public Speaker’s Guide to Success in Every Situation, as well as Ace Your Interview, Powerful Presenter, and Expert Presenter. Her work has been featured in CBS Money Watch, Ragan.com, Woman’s Day, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and many others. Her institutional clients include Johns Hopkins Medicine, Harvard University, NY Academy of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Genentech, and Roche.