How to Make Better Hiring Decisions
Hiring is an essential part of any organization and whether it’s to replace a vacant position or to support expansion, it’s vital to the organization’s overall success that you’re hiring the right people.
There are numerous factors to consider when trying to hire the right people – experience, acquired skills, whether they will be a good fit within the company’s culture, career goals, and much more. With so much to consider when choosing to extend a job offer or not, how do you ensure you’re making the right decision?
There’s no way to guarantee you’re making the right choice in who you extend an offer to, but there are ways to get all the information that will most likely result in better hiring practices and decisions overall.
Do Your Research
Sifting through a stack of resumes takes time and attention you probably don’t have in abundance. But once you’ve sorted the stack into “yes” and “no” piles, it’s important to dedicate more effort into researching your potential interview candidates.
Spend time closely reviewing their resumes, and follow up with some online research. You may notice some red flags that help narrow down your potential candidate list, or maybe you’ll find a green flag that makes a candidate stand out a little more than they had before.
Having as much information about your candidates before interviewing them will not only save you time in better determining who you actually want to interview, but also allows you to ask better, more informed questions during the interview, which assists in making better hiring decisions.
Involve Your Team
Whether HR is handling the sourcing, recruiting and hiring, or a manager or supervisor of the available openings is, it’s important to get feedback from the members of the team who will be working directly with the new employee. Having a good understanding of what they need in a new team member will ensure a better transition and overall fit for everyone involved. There may be a specific skill or trait they’re currently missing that’s important for the new hire to possess in order to succeed in their new role with their new team.
Do a Working Interview
A great way to determine a candidate’s fit for both the position and your organization before making a full-time job offer is to have them do a working interview. This allows you to see how they interact with your team, how they think and learn, and how they handle different situations and challenges that may arise before extending a full job offer. This also allows them to get a good understanding of the role and your organization, which will help them in their decision to accept a potential job offer or not.
Working interviews are usually best facilitated through a staffing and recruiting agency. Depending on your needs, agencies offer different services that will allow you to conduct working interviews with top candidate(s):
- Staffing – Temporary and Contract
When you don’t have the capacity or resources to dedicate to sourcing and recruiting candidates yourself, staffing services provide you with qualified candidates with no hiring obligation on a contract, temporary or temp-to-hire basis.
- Payrolling
When you self-source the candidates you want to hire, and want to put them to work quickly without having to jump the hurdles and red tape involved with hiring and onboarding, payrolling services provide you with the opportunity to easily conduct a working interview without jumping through the hoops involved in hiring.
Take Your Time
Your eagerness to fill a position fast might cloud your judgement. Hiring someone too quickly increases your chances of winding up with someone who isn’t a great fit, and then you’re back to square one. While waiting to fill a position can be stressful, it’s important to prioritize finding the right person, even if it takes a little more time. Being particular about who you choose to join the team shows your employees you really care.
Hiring is vital to any organization’s success, so it’s important that the most informed decisions regarding who you’re choosing to offer a position to are being made. It’s impossible to know for sure you’re hiring the best person to fill that open position, but by doing thorough research, involving your team, and conducting working interviews, you put yourself and your organization in the best position possible when hiring.