No one can argue the importance of making the right hire in your organization. Statistics 
on workplace productivity prove out time and again that one top performer has the productivity level of three average employees and yet, only 50 percent of the employees hired are considered to be “good hires.”
Whether it is you or a member of your team who is doing the hiring in your organization, having a game plan for successful hiring includes bringing your company goals and your potential employees’ goals into focus while pointing both in the same direction.
Following these 7 simple steps can help you to avoid hiring headaches, increase your chances of locating and hiring those top performers and ultimately enhance the overall culture and effectiveness in your business:
- Define the role and the goal – Not only is it important to clearly define the position and role this employee will have, but it is also vital to lay out a roadmap for what determines “success” in the job role. Make sure you establish the roles and goals of each position as well as having your systems in place for measuring performance in each position before you even start interviewing.
- Connect the dots between company goals and your hiring package – While it may make sense on the surface to offer an industry-competitive and attractive salary and benefits packages based solely on the position, make sure that package also matches well with the company’s overall goals and strategies. Examine how the position fits the overall strategic plan for your company and determine what type of person is best suited for that role before crafting your hiring package.
- Have a recruiting plan in place before you start – Determine in advance who will be doing the recruiting and handling the interviews. How many levels of approval have to be cleared before a new employee can be hired? Who will be involved in the process? How will you locate candidates?
- Use effective tools to target candidates – Long gone are the days when we simply put a classified ad in the newspaper or trade magazines to target candidates for hire. There are incredibly effective tools available to filter your candidates on many levels long before you sit face-to-face. In most industries these days, there are even category-specific services that can help you to target ideal candidates for hire. Be sure to evaluate your options before simply relying on Craigslist or Monster.com as your employee candidate targeting strategy.
- Develop a “Strategic Script” for your interview processes – A Strategic Script is not a word-for-word layout of an interview, but instead and process that you will follow; a sequence of events that leads to the ideal end result. For example, you might start with the standard “get to know you” questions, followed by employment history and references and then move into your deeper questioning (in the next step). Having an outline to follow not only increases consistency but also systemizes your hiring processes so they can be easily passed on to others who might assume the hiring role at a later time.
- Ask great questions and dig deeper – So many hiring managers and business owners spend all their time on the “standard” questions like job history, references and experience. Remember, you are creating a company culture and to enhance your chances of getting that “top 50% hire” that is going to produce the results that match your goals and culture, you need to get inside the potential hire. Asking more revealing questions allows to you discover more than simple facts and employment history; you will be able to better discern how someone thinks and how they are likely to respond in various situations, while you learn more about their individual personality in the process.
- Plug your new hire into the right success systems right away – Letting a new hire know in the interview process that systems are already in place to assure and track their success in the job role creates a level of confidence coming into the position. Your new hire knows that the company not only cares about success in the job role, but is also invested in his or her individual success. Once you have committed to that new hire, getting them plugged into those systems right away is your best bet for creating a solid new foundation for success in the role, thus success in the company.
Following these seven steps will help to put you in the driver’s seat for all your hiring tasks, take the pain out of hiring and allow you to turn your company into a lean, mean hiring machine!