These Steps Will Help You Recruit Superior Employees
Do you select new employees based largely on an attractive resume and the candidate’s performance at the resultant first job interview? If so, you are missing the opportunity to use additional recruiting and screening methods that will ensure a superior hire.
A good looking resume is often professionally prepared, or, at least professionally reviewed. A positive interview leaves all participants excited about the potential new employee. But, do these steps ensure a successful hire? An employee whose performance will exceed your expectations? Research says, it's not likely that these two factors will ensure that your organization is hiring superior, high quality employees.
How Important Is an Interview?
In "The Most Common Hiring Mistakes - and How to Prevent Them," Peter Gilbert states, "In a University of Michigan study titled 'The Validity and Utility of Alternative Predictors of Job Performance,' John and Rhonda Hunter analyzed how well job interviews accurately predict success on the job.
"The surprising finding: The typical interview increases your chances of choosing the best candidate by less than 2 percent. In other words, flipping a coin to choose between two candidates would be only 2 percent less reliable than basing your decision on an interview."
This number is not encouraging when you are attempting to recruit and hire a superior work force. This is especcially true when
How Can You Ensure You Hire Superior Employees?
So, what actions can you take that will bring you superior hires? You need to start your recruiting process with a planning meeting. At this recruiting planning meeting, you need to follow a specific agenda and make a plan to recruit your new employee of choice.
The steps agreed upon in this meeting will ensure that more than a resume and an interview are considered when you evaluate the likelihood of each candidate's success in your open job.
You can conduct this planning meeting via email, but a face-to-face meeting may yield better results. You will also find that you need to spend significantly less time when you are hiring new people for the same job for which you have already created a recruiting plan.
Recruiting Planning Meeting Checklist
Decide Whether a New Employee Is Necessary
Determine the need for a new hire, develop a job specification from a job analysis and a job description. Schedule the recruiting planning meeting with the appropriate attendees, minimally, the Human Resources recruiter and the hiring manager.
Other attendees can include successful co-workers; an indirect, but interested, manager, possibly a manager who is the customer of the position you are filling; and other internal customers of the position.
Rank the Characteristics You Seek in Your Potential Candidates
Use the job specification, which may also be revised during this meeting, and your experience with other employees who have worked successfully in a similar position, rank the most important qualities, experiences, education, and characteristics that your successful candidate will possess.
This ranking allows your HR recruiter to use these characteristics to write your job postings, post the job online, and screen the arriving resumes. (The HR recruiter will use the complete job specification, but the prioritization is helpful in identifying the characyeristics you seek in a candidate.)
Determine the Best Places to Post Your Job Listing to Find Candidates
Now that you have the important requirements prioritized, determine where to advertise the position to develop the most exhaustive candidate pool. You will want to includie asking for internal referrals from employees and posting on professional association websites related to the position.
One of the most successful ways to find a superior hire is to ask your current employees to broadcast your opening to their qualified friends and social media contacts on sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Another is to find candidates directly on LinkedIn.
Determine the Employees Who Will Conduct Interviews
Determine who will interview the potential employees and the qualities of the candidates they will need to evaluate. For example, one interviewer needs to consider technical skills, another, cultural fit, a third, customer orientation, and a fourth, job fit (can your prospect do the job?). Assignments depend on the qualities and characteristics you seek in the new employee. Plan the interview and follow-up process.
Determine Candidate Phone Screen Questions
Decide upon the candidate screening questions for the HR recruiter and/or the hiring manager whomever will perform the telephone screens.
Determine Candidate Interview Questions
Assign interview topics and questions to the employees who will conduct the interviews. These questions should be behaviorally-based. You can also write scenarios, or brief role plays, and ask the candidates to tell you how they would solve a particular problem, resolve a common work situation, or improve a work process.
Ideally, each interviewer will assess a different area of the potential employee’s qualifications such as cultural fit, technical capabilities, experience, ability to communicate, interpersonal effectiveness, and so forth.
Determine What Pre-Employment Assessments Can Help You Select the Best
Decide if testing will assist you to select the best candidate for the job. As an example, you may want to give a writing test to a customer service candidate who will communicate with customers chiefly through email.
You can ask a technical writer to produce a writing sample for you. You might ask a developer to program a simple task. (You need to make sure that every candidate for the position receives the same test at the same point in the selection process; generally you will want to test only your finalists.)
For Society of Human Resource Management members, this comprehensive look at the types of pre-employment testing available also provides a straightforward assessment about how you can stay out of legal hot water when using candidate testing.
Determine the Questions Your Interviewers Will Use to Assess Candidates
Identify the appropriate questions for the candidate post-interview assessment by each interviewer. In addition to several generic questions, these should comprise a checklist that closely mirrors the characteristics you have determined are most important in the person you hire. for your open position
Conclusion
This planning meeting and the recruiting activities that result from it will improve your employee selection process. An improved recruiting and selection process ensures that your organization is selecting candidates who will succeed and star as members of your superior work force.
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