Hiring the right people can greatly influence how successful your business will be. Staff recruitment is no easy task. First, you have to face the fact that you will be judged by the hiring decisions you make. Also, there is the pressure to please certain figures in your company.
But, it’s not all dull and gloom. There are certain steps you can take to ensure that you hire the right people every time:
1- Look For Career Commitment In Candidates
A candidate who shows a fair amount of commitment to their career is worth giving a chance. You do not want to end up hiring a person who can easily switch jobs and careers when the money is right. Loyalty is a key trait to lookout for. A person who is not loyal to your company is not worth hiring in the first place.
You can easily gauge a person’s loyalty to their job or career by looking at how long they have held certain job positions in the past.
2- Asses Learning and Analytical Skills
You can employ a wide range of techniques to assess the levels of learning and analytical prowess in your candidates. Doing this assessment may not be so easy but it is very important because you cannot solely depend on a person’s resume and measure of confidence during an interview to determine if they are the right person for the job.
Don’t get it wrong though – confidence is good. However, your aim should be to hire someone who has the right intellectual and practical skills. Satish Bakhda (Rikvin.com) acknowledges that a person’s confidence is an excellent trait but what you really have to consider is a person’s academic qualifications and job skills.
3- Check Compatibility
Your aim should be to hire someone that will fit in perfectly with your organization’s culture. So, will they be able to get along effortlessly with other employees? How are they getting along with professionals and business clients in your respective industry. The answers to these questions can help you to gauge a candidate’s compatibility with your business.
You must recognize that a person’s willingness to take up the job is not the only thing they need to show to get the job. They should prove that they can easily get along with other people. If they were not able to get along with their previous managers or clients, it may not be the best idea to hire them.
Related Reading:
How to Build a Winning Startup Team with Collaborative Hiring
4- Constantly Improving The Hiring Process
The hiring process is indeed very crucial whether you are looking for people to help you start your own business or hiring employees for a big firm. A lot of emphasis has to be placed on this process. To ensure that the hiring process is air-tight, consider these tips:
Avoid relying on irrelevant or magic-bullet questions when interviewing candidates. Instead, stick to questions that focus on overall potential, attitude, confidence, skills, knowledge and capabilities of the candidate.
When advertising for a position in your company, it is important that all the requirements for candidates (skills, knowledge, experience, education and responsibilities) are clearly mentioned in order to attract the right people to apply for the job. Also, this helps you to better assess the candidates that avail themselves for the job.
It is also very advisable to include a wide range of professionals in the hiring process. This is simply because multiple opinions are better than just a few. Here’s what others look for in this post from nPower.
5- Always Remember To Hire Interns
Some people may not agree with this idea but it is actually a proven way of getting the right employees for your company. With interns, you are able to evaluate firsthand their confidence levels, behavior, attitudes, knowledge, skills, strengths, weaknesses and even their quality of work. What else would you want to know?
If you have already hired a couple of interns, you can make your hiring process much easier by hiring from this existing pool of people to fill any vacant positions in your business.
Related Reading:
HireOwl; Making it Easier for Startups to Hire the Best Student Interns
6- Socialize With The Candidates
This does not mean getting too personal with candidates. However, your HR team can get to know the candidates better maybe through socializing and assessing their presence on social media. This is quite necessary especially for tech companies.
A small research into a candidate’s social media presence can actually tell you a lot more than you think. You’ll be shocked to know that big tech companies are nowadays advertising most of their jobs on social media. Approximately 45% of fortune 500 companies are currently recruiting using the main social media sites on the web.
The Bottom Line:
You can certainly hire the best candidates for your own startup or for others with a hiring process that follows the guidelines above. But just before making the final decision about the candidate, do not forget to get the background check done.
