Synopsis
If you have people in your employ who you regret hiring, you need a more structured hiring process. A poor hire not only costs you significant money. They make it difficult for the solid employees that have to work with them. Avoid this costly mistake by taking more care to hire an employee than you would to borrow money to buy a high-priced asset you expect to make “big” money by acquiring. For nearly every business, the difference between making what a business should and what it did is a function of who gets hired and retained by management.
How to quickly improve your employee hiring practices so you employ the best people
The most valuable resource in any business is its people. The people in your employ have the most significant impact on business profitability and cash flow while representing one of the top three costs for the business. The key to every company’s future, no matter its size, is the people it hires today. You improve your odds of hiring the best people by adopting the following hiring policy:
(Name of company) does not discriminate nor permit discrimination among potential candidates or employees for open positions or other matters related to jobs based on Race, Religion, Gender, Age, Country of Origin, Marital status, Sexual preference, or other matters that fundamentally do not affect the potential of an individual to perform a job to our company’s standards successfully.
Yes, the above policy meets all of today’s political correctness standards. It is also the right thing to do. You never want to exclude from your candidate pool people who are different from you. Talking to qualified people regardless of their diversity is good business. What’s even better business is to hire people to do a job to the company’s standards. Who earn more for their employer than they cost as an employee. This is ultimately what you are screening for in every job candidate.
The goal of the job candidate interview
The objective in interviewing a candidate is to find people who share the core values and principles of the business and who help the business make, not lose, money. The following are the “critical few” interview zones you need to assess every candidate for:
- Technical Competency: Does the candidate KNOW-HOW to do the designated job. The extent to which they meet the job requirements, have familiarity with, and have prior experience of the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks associated with the job as defined in our job description?
- Interpersonal Skills: How do they get along with people, their ability to mix with and interface with different personality types in the regular performance of their job?
- Communication Skills: What are their written and verbal skills? One on one and within a team.
- Management Competency: What is their management style, what do they think of people, their performance expectations, and how do they respond to above and below performance levels? # of people supervised? Critical – how well do they implement the seven (7) traits of highly effective people?
- Administrative Skills: Ability to manage and meet budgets, achieve assigned results while working across competing completion dates. Are they willing and able to document and assess what is working well, where the business is getting stuck, and identify what should be done differently?
The first three interview zones apply to every potential employee you are considering, with the latter two applying to those you are considering for a management position.
What gets in the way of hiring the best people?
A major mistake for most interviewers is asking too many general questions covering a wide area. This results in superficial answers and fails to give depth of understanding to a candidate. Instead, stay focused on the critical few objectives of the open position and drill down. In other words, follow through on your questions by going deeper, asking for more specifics, details to learn why they did what they did.
Jumping all around from topic to topic gives you surface answers that never help you know if the candidate is a good fit for the business and the position. Drill down for specifics. The details beneath the initial question will give you the most beneficial information about the candidate. You want to ask: How did you do it? Or What did you learn? Or Why did you do that?
A candidate’s ability to give you specifics is how you assess their fit for the position. Their inability to give specifics – shows you that they are not someone to hire. Knowing and speaking the “jargon” is more a cover-up for lack of real applied experience. When “jargon” without substance is given, you have a candidate attempting to “bluff” you into thinking they can do the job.
Candidate warning signs to always be on the lookout for
The candidate warning signs to watch out for during the interview process are the following:
- Body Language: Be aware of people crossing their arms, touching their face, mouth, ears, or fumbling with their hair – these behaviors suggest a person is “concealing” something or not being entirely forthcoming. Use such behaviors to probe the specific activity further.
- Facial Expressions: Be concerned if they like to stare you down, blink a lot, or look to the right or left.
- Repetition: Constantly repeating the same information. People who do this are hoping that you will believe them if they repeat it enough times.
- Failing to Give Specifics: If a person only gives generalities, and despite probing, refuses to give specifics, such as dates, precise numbers, names, and places, that’s a “red flag.”
- Dodging the Question: If they consistently answer a different question or ask you a question in turn instead of giving you their answer is cause for concern.
Never underestimate the cost and profit impact of each individual you invite to come into your employ. This is particularly true in small businesses with few employees. The best way to improve business profitability and cash flow is to hire the best people. Use a structured hiring process to help you screen out the best candidate from the average and particularly from the weak.
Failure to hire the right person not only disrespects your good employees, it distracts everyone and costs you money. If you find yourself wishing you had never hired a person, it represents an opportunity to review your hiring process to see what you missed. It also forces you to implement your progressive discipline process to deal with the substandard employee whose performance is costing you money.
Would you like help improving your hiring process?
Click here to have one of our certified BusinessCPR™ Coaches send you samples of our candidate assessment guide and our post-interview assessment to help you improve your odds of hiring the best people.
Would you like to improve your hiring process?
Click the link below to have one of our certified BusinessCPR™ Coaches send you samples of our candidate assessment guide and our post-interview assessment to help you improve your odds of hiring the best people.
SCHEDULE APPOINTMENT
