Optimizing Your Hiring Process
Optimizing Your Hiring Process
Hiring great people is a must for every company hoping to grow. Create a hiring system to streamline and standardize your search for talent.
When hiring, you need a strategy with a consistent format. Construct a firm idea of what you are looking for in a candidate or you’ll conclude the interview knowing what the candidate wants you to know, rather than what you need to know to reach a successful decision.
“You must have consistency,” confirms Phyllis Shurn-Hannah, president of Cascade Associates, headquartered in Philadelphia. “And in the rush to hire an employee, some companies overlook essential steps, which gets them in trouble.”
Indeed, the American Psychological Association says that 67% of job seekers embellish their resumes. That places you in the position of creating a system to identify the truly excellent employees among those who are only pretending.
In this Quick-Read you will find:
- Strategies to standardize your hiring approach.
- Useful reference-check tips.
- Different types of interview styles.
Hiring great people helps you build strategic assets. You are hiring the people who are the future builders of your products and services. It’s one of the most important functions you can develop — and one of the most difficult. But if you hire correctly, you dramatically increase your chances of success.
Strategies to standardize your hiring approach
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Create and publicize (internally) the methodology for recruiting employees at your company. If there is a point person, such as a human resources director, who coordinates all new hires, let your staff know that. That way when they encounter promising prospects, there is a person who can pick up the contact and run with it.
Remember that hiring is not just a way to fill empty chairs around the office — it’s a strategy for making your company stronger. Don’t wait for a position to become vacant in your company before starting the search — keep a constant watch for new talent. If you find a great programmer or salesperson when you’re “fully staffed,” hire him or her anyway. The new business brought your way could more than pay for the salary. (For more “guerilla recruiting” techniques, see our Quick Read “Recruiting in Tough Times.”)
Success boils down to uncovering more than one facet of a candidate to see if he or she matches your company goals and isn’t exaggerating his or her abilities. To play fair, require interviewers to ask all candidates the same set of preselected questions, and write down the answers, along with the manager’s impressions. However, resist taping the conversation because this scares job seekers unnecessarily. Don’t overlook colleagues’ input — the candidate’s future coworkers deserve a say.
Human resources experts use a multitude of interviewing styles, such as:
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Competency based (behavioral): The interview draws out previous life experiences as predictors of future performance abilities. Here you dig at an experience from practical to cerebral levels to ensure the candidate isn’t indulging in fictional storytelling.
Check references carefully. Don’t skip this step. Some companies you call may only be willing to confirm facts for fear of a defamation lawsuit. Others, however, may give you some insight into the candidate. Listen to the tone of how the reference tells you about the candidate. For example: one former employer told the reference checker, “We agreed in the lawsuit not to say anything negative about that candidate.” Take the clue you’ve been handed and move on. At the very least, checking references will confirm the truthfulness of the candidates and their resumes. Be willing to spend significant time on this step as it is one of your best tools for preventing a bad hire.
When you operate a biking and hiking excursion service that covers vacation tours at more than 100 locations, the guides’ attitudes hold your business in the palms of their hands. Just ask Marcy Porus, the vice president of operations for Backroads in Berkeley, Calif., who oversees the hiring process.
“Our trip leaders are Backroads employees — not subcontractors — and we feel they are the core asset of the business. Weather can be great, hotels can be superb, but it’s the leaders who add the personal touches that make the trip unforgettable,” she says. “Our guests return to Backroads and tell friends to come along because they prize the experience.”
Porus sets up initial interviews with an existing trip leader who has been prepped on the personality and skill qualities she seeks. Between this interviewer and Porus, the two cover both behavioral and fact-finding questions, although in a mixed fashion so the conversations don’t become predictable.
Next, the potential employee must perform an on-site bike test (diagnosing a sick bike and naming bike tools) a s well as complete a math test and writing sample. Porus calls her final phase the Leader Hiring Event, where Backroads executives treat the 100 or so candidates who’ve made the cut to this point to a two-day camping excursion in April. Here, they rate individuals during role-playing games. Typically the management team agrees on 40 to 70 tour leaders by the end of the session.
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Ask your department manager to determine exactly what the job entails and to develop a working job description.
Hiring Great People by Kevin C. Klinvex, Matthew S. O’Connell, and Christopher P. Klinvex (McGraw-Hill, 1999).
A Manager’s Guide to Hiring the Best Person for Every Job by DeAnne Rosenberg (Wiley, 2000). Interviewing technique tips.
“Hiring: Tell me about it,” by Teri Lammers et al. Inc., (December 1990): 149.
“The ABCs of Interviewing,” by Peter Carbonara. Fast Company (August 1996): 80.
“Interview Quiz,” Interviewer’s Edge. Management Team Consultants, 2001.
Interview Techniques, from Tips on the Hiring Process by Bill Prince and Patrick Milliken. eJobs, Inc., 2000. Click on Contents in the navigation column and select Questioning Techniques.
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