Hiring a Great Employee Starts With a Robust Hiring Process
Hiring well is an essential component of building a successful organization, especially in service organizations that are selling the abilities of their team to serve their clients/customers’ needs and solve their problems. Peter Drucker, widely considered to be the world’s foremost pioneer of management theory, believed that people are an organization’s most valuable resource.
Likewise, former Stanford Business School Professor turned best-selling business author, Jim Collins, definitively states “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.” Plain and simple, when you don’t hire well, it’s not only a costly mistake that some estimate as high as $240,000 per bad hire, it is incredibly demotivating to your existing team.
In my more than 30-year career spanning various industries, I have hired dozens of employees. While I’m not an expert in human resources or a recruiter, I have experienced the joys of hiring well and the agony of poor hiring decisions first-hand. I have found there are three keys to developing a robust hiring process and hiring well.
1. Assemble a Diverse Hiring Team.
A diverse hiring team will collect a variety of perspectives about which candidates will be an excellent fit for your organization by offering unique insights, notice different candidate responses, and probe various aspects of the candidate’s ability to fill the position. Additionally, your team is not just there to evaluate the candidate; they are also there to sell the candidate on your organization. A diverse hiring team will appeal to your top applicants by expressing different benefits of working at your organization.
While a diverse team is critical, one person needs to champion your hiring effort. The champion need not always be your human resources manager, although she/he needs to be an essential member of the team. The champion could hold a variety of job titles but must have a trait portfolio that includes being a keen observer, a good listener, intuitive, reads people well, a creative problem solver and understands the direction your company is headed.
2. Build a Robust and Fresh Hiring Process.
The days of the “traditional” conference room-bound interview are over! Robust hiring processes have multiple steps, are more involved, and experiential. Your hiring process’s primary goal is to produce the best candidate for the position advertised and the future of your organization. Infusing your existing team with energy about corporate growth and leaving all candidates with a great impression of your organization are important secondary goals. Incorporating crisp, online candidate screening appointments, posing a current organizational problem-solving assignment, taking the candidate on a firm tour to watch interactions and note the degree of inquisitiveness, conducting second interviews at a restaurant over a meal, etc. can provide multiple reference points for making a more well-informed decision about the best candidate.
3. Utilize a Behavioral Assessment Tool.
Adding a behavioral assessment survey as a step in our hiring process significantly helped our team dig deeper into the candidate’s strengths, adaptability, communication, energy, and decision-making styles. We added this step into our hiring process at the midpoint when we were down to two to three finalists. The relatively small monetary investment was exponentially worth the improved results.
Armed with additional data on our candidates, we were able to tailor questions and small problem-solving assignments into our remaining hiring steps that allowed us to more fully understand which finalist could bring the most to our organization.
We used the same assessment tool for our entire existing team and therefore could develop job profiles of our strongest staff and then look for those traits in our candidate pool. I became such a believer in the power of behavioral assessment tools that I became a Certified PDP Global Professional and routinely administer this assessment for my clients.
There are so many ways to improve your hiring process and hire great candidates. Enjoy one of my favorite articles that expounds on several sound hiring practices—How to Hire the Right Person.
Take a few minutes to think about your current hiring process and the results they have yielded over the past three years. If the hiring results are less than stellar, gather a committed internal team to conduct a deep dive on your hiring processes’ strengths and weaknesses. Admit what you don’t do well and get help. When our hiring process felt staid and unimaginative, we hired a consultant to help us revamp it and dramatically improved our outcomes. We got creative and included many of the elements I’ve outlined above.
Once you’ve hired a great employee, please don’t let your efforts end there. You need to continually invest in your good hires to keep them by:
Having an excellent compensation and benefits plan
