Hiring the wrong person is incredibly costly for any company. Once you figure in the wasted costs involved in hiring (interview time, background checks, pre-employment testing, recruiting fees, advertising costs), on the job costs (training, payroll, benefits), and intangibles (low productivity, lost sales, negative impact on clients, team stress, other employees needing to cover the open role), the costs are staggering. Then add in the need to do it all over again!
The trick of course is to hire the right person for the job the first time rather than go through the torturous process repeatedly. Here are three tips for getting it right the first time.
- Clearly define the role. For most hiring managers, writing a job description is deadly dull and difficult—a task best left to human resources professionals. Unfortunately, your HR support team does not know the position as well as you do—particularly if it is a newly created role or a unique position. Therefore, most job descriptions are vague using lots of jargon to make up for the lack of specificity.
- Clearly define the way the tasks must be performed. Understanding your conative (doing) style and the style the job requires goes a long way toward ensuring you’ll identify the proper candidate. Think hard about how important the processes involved are—is the methodology what is critical or is the end result more important (by the way, that is not a trick question—either answer can be appropriate). Are you (the hiring manager) comfortable allowing team members to solve problems in ways that are uncomfortable for you?
- Structure the interview to help move you through the process. Too often managers think the best way to evaluate a candidate is just to have a conversation. This is a lovely way to determine whether you want to have lunch with someone; it is not a reliable way to predict whether someone will be successful in a given position. This approach relies entirely on personality to evaluate the candidate and generally has about a 14% success rate in determining the candidate’s potential for success. (If I haven’t convinced you, think of it this way: if all you do is focus on conversation and personality, you will have been much more productive to choose a candidate by flipping a coin—at least then you’ll have been right in 50% of the cases and you’ll have saved yourself a lot of time.)
Tags: conation, conative, hiring, human resources, interview process, interviewing
Judi Cogen's Blog 
November 15, 2011 at 11:29 am |
Great topic – How Do You Hire the Right Person? While every applicant paints the same smile and most often presents well written documentation sharing their “goods”, it’s often surprising to HR Professionals that 73% of job applications contain falsified information and over 90% of the time applicants deny conviction histories, usually excluding the city where they lived. So how do you find all these “Hidden Truths”, especially if you do not know where to look?
There are vast differences in the many methods of background checks available, most providing little more that a false sense of security. However, there is a method of running a quality check, which stands to reason should be included in the process of hiring the “Right Person”.