Finding the right people to fill the seats on your bus may be the hardest work you do as a business owner. One key to this process is having a formal hiring process in place so that you can track candidates by their skills, abilities, and cultural fit. Here are five steps you can take right now to ensure you’re making the right hiring decisions for your teams and your company.
1. Hire for Cultural Fit.
Can you even describe your company culture? What is your mission? Do you have core values? All of these things make up the culture of your company. Hiring people that fit this criterion is critically important to ensuring you have the right people internally to do the job.
2. Build Detailed, Accurate Job Descriptions.
This should always be the first step in your hiring process. Organizations that fail to build accurate and detailed job descriptions will end up hiring from their instinct about whether they like the person and not whether they have the skills to do the job. These skills should be captured in a tracking system that allows your hiring teams to carefully note their impressions of the candidate based on their skills.
3. Don’t Wing It On interviews.
We still see this mistake all the time. The interview process should be carefully designed to bring out the best in every candidate, with carefully crafted questions designed to ferret out their skills. If you’re including other people in the interview process, make sure that they have a good set of questions so that they can add value to the interview process. Consider using behavioral questions designed to seek out details on how candidates performed in past job settings.
4. Test Your Candidates.
Requiring candidates to take a skills-based test is never a bad idea. If the candidate has a 20-year track record of documentable skills, that’s one thing. But what about if you’re not completely sure of the candidate’s skills? The answer is a testing process to check and validate the skills the candidate says they have.
5. Think Outside the Box.
You should always be on the lookout for transferable skills. Say you have a candidate that is a clear cultural fit that has many of the skills you’re looking for to fit the job opening. But they are also missing a few of the skills you need. In this job market, it might be best to make the hire and make arrangements to train up your new employee. Or, ask yourself if you’re willing to consider a highly experienced candidate that lacks an undergraduate degree. Does the lack of a BA hamper that candidate from doing the job? These are all important exercises in thinking outside the box of your on-paper requirements versus reality.
How can you keep track of all these important details when conducting a job search?
The key to finding the right candidates is a robust, smart applicant tracking system (ATS) to keep control over all of the documentation you’ll need to ultimately find the right fit for your company. Without an ATS like Exelare, you simply won’t have all of the tools you’ll need to find the right people at the right time for your company. Find out how we’ve been helping our clients find a better caliber of employees by staying more organized and working smarter. Take a demo today.
