Daniel Rose’s top five hiring tips

Hir­ing is per­haps on of the most expen­sive things you’ll do in busi­ness. There are costs involved with recruit­ing a pool of peo­ple who might be right. There are more costs involved in select­ing the right one from the pool. Then you have the costs involved in actu­ally putting that employee on staff. That’s before you even get to the poten­tial costs of pick­ing the wrong person.

I’ve put together a list of my top five tips for hir­ing new staff, in the hope that this may help.

1. Review and update the posi­tion description

The first step in hir­ing must always be the posi­tion descrip­tion. If you don’t entirely under­stand what the posi­tion involves, how can you ever hope to fill it with the cor­rect person?

There are many meth­ods to analyse the posi­tion and deter­mine if the descrip­tion is up to date. Try inter­views with incum­bents, man­agers and peers. The key is to have a thor­ough under­stand­ing of the posi­tion, dis­tilled into a well researched and cor­rect writ­ten description.

2. Develop clear and objec­tive selec­tion criteria

Armed with a posi­tion descrip­tion, it’s a rel­a­tively sim­ple mat­ter to come up with selec­tion cri­te­ria. What’s impor­tant, though, is that the cri­te­ria are clear, objec­tive and meaningful.

In some cases, this is dif­fi­cult. Dis­till­ing a multi-page descrip­tion into five or ten key selec­tion cri­te­ria requires care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion. Con­sider what are the most impor­tant skills, traits or expe­ri­ence for suc­cess in the role. That’s where impor­tant selec­tion cri­te­ria are found.

3. Build a recruit­ment pool

Too many peo­ple have a well devel­oped posi­tion descrip­tion and cri­te­ria, then just place an adver­tise­ment in the week­end paper. That’s not an effec­tive way to build a pool of candidates.

Like­wise, hav­ing a recruit­ment com­pany do this may not always be effec­tive either. What’s impor­tant is that the recruit­ment pool is gath­ered from mul­ti­ple areas in which qual­i­fied can­di­dates exist. What that means is that it’s not much use seek­ing out a lawyer in a gar­den­ing pub­li­ca­tion. Sure, the ideal can­di­date may be read­ing, but you need to cast a wider net.

That said, cast­ing your net too wide is a waste of time. Deter­mine where your likely can­di­dates are, and recruit from there.

4. Struc­ture Interviews

One of the worst things you can do when hir­ing is to have unstruc­tured con­ver­sa­tions, think­ing that they are inter­views. These lead to dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions with dif­fer­ent can­di­dates, cov­er­ing dif­fer­ent areas.

Develop some ques­tions based on your selec­tion cri­te­ria, and stick to them. Each can­di­date receives the same ques­tions, and their responses to each are rated. This ensures that one can­di­date is not pre­ferred inad­ver­tantly because of the con­ver­sa­tional style.

That’s not to say the can­di­dates can’t talk. They cer­tainly can respond to the ques­tions, and ask their own. The impor­tant thing is that the ques­tions given are all structured.

5. Take Advan­tage of Pro­ba­tion Periods

Almost all orga­ni­za­tions have some form of pro­ba­tion period. Dur­ing that time, if the employee doesn’t per­form as you expect, ter­mi­nate them.

Too many peo­ple do not do this. Instead, they shy away from the con­fronta­tion, set­tling for mediocre work. That’s not smart. If it hasn’t worked out, apol­o­gize to the employee, ter­mi­nate them, and move on. There is absolutely no rea­son to keep them on, with hopes of improved performance.

---

I hope these tips can make your hir­ing life less painful. If you have any you’d like to add or dis­cuss, feel free to post a com­ment or con­tact me.

HR, Human resource management, Management, People, Talent