Hiring someone new to work in your business is one of the most critical decisions a business owner makes, although it is not always given the justice it deserves. If a position is vacant, or additional staff are needed, recruitment decisions are often driven by the pressure to get someone in quickly, rather than waiting for the best person to fill the job. Lack of proper and systematic recruitment process can also result in a high cost to the business.
The direct and indirect costs of this recruitment process are many, and have been estimated to be at least 30% of the new persons salary on average:
Recruitment costs include advertising and agency fees (if used), travel
Cost of time for everyone involved in the interview process
Cost of having the job unfilled if the process is lengthy
Cost of lost productivity the show must go on! Co-workers are picking up extra workload and completing unfinished projects. The reduced productivity of managers who lose key staff can be a big issue
Cost of training on average it takes 20 weeks for new employees to become fully productive. Consider also the costs of orientation, learning materials and lost productivity of the manager overseeing the new employee.
Costs of person filling in this may be a current employee, in which case their own job suffers, or a temporary person.
Further costs are incurred when the process is inefficient and time-consuming, and when the process does not result in the best person for the job being hired.
So there is a great incentive to hire the right people and keep them for as long as possible.
So what approach to recruitment gives the best chance of long-term success?
Job Definition
You need to have a clear understanding of what the job involves in terms of its main activities, responsibilities and priorities. There are a plethora of Job Definition templates out there to use if your need help with this aspect.
Once the nature of the job has been clearly defined, specify the attributes (education, skills, experience, attitude) of a person who is likely to do the job successfully. Whilst relevant experience is always nice to have, bear in mind that a persons attitude is one of the biggest predictors of job success. You can always train a person to learn a new skill, but it is much harder to try and get someone to adopt a new attitude.
Attracting and Assessing Applicants
There are numerous sources for finding applicants for a job. Some of these include traditional newspaper advertising, approaching people directly, use of agencies, job groups, unemployment agencies and so on. The one you use will vary depending on the job and industry. When it comes to assessing applicants, most people make the same mistake we all believe we are good judges of character, and trust our gut when it comes to making hiring decisions. Sometimes this will work, but often it will not. A sound recruitment process works to take as much of the subjectivity out of the process as possible.
To achieve this you need to be organized in your approach to hiring. There are all sorts of assessments and psychological testing available now to make more objective hiring decisions. This is not practical for many business owners, so at the very minimum you should include the following steps in your process:
Have a written definition of what the job involves
Decide what skills are essential for the position this can include technical skills and qualitative skills such as communication, negotiation etc.
Develop a list of questions to get an understanding of each applicants experience in each essential skill.
If possible try to interview with 2 people present to ensure you are not being biased in a particular direction
Ask every applicant exactly the same questions, and note down their answers so you can compare them afterwards.
Make your selection based on each applicants fit to the essential criteria only use the responses they gave you during the interview, dont let your instinct take over.
Use Behavioural Interviewing Techniques
This sounds like a mouthful, but in truth its a simple concept: the best predictor of future performance is past behaviour.
So, if theyve behaved a certain way in the past, theres a good chance theyll behave that way in the future. The key for the interviewer is to find out what theyve done in the past. Anyone can tell you what they will do if they come to work for you, but theyre probably just saying it to get the job. You need to know specifically what they actually have done.
Heres an example of a poorly designed question which allows the interviewee to say anything they like:
Tell me how you would handle a complaining customer.
Heres the same question designed to get the interviewed to describe a past behaviour:
Tell me about a time when you had a customer complaint. What exactly did you do to resolve the issue on that occasion?
So you are asking your questions in a way that forces them to give you a real life example. If they cant come up with an example, then you know they probably havent been in that situation before.
Behavioural interviewing allows you to collect much more valuable information about the candidates actual experience so you can make the best hiring decision.
Interview Structure
A good basic structure for an interview is:
Greet, chitchat, make them feel at ease, build rapport.
Tell them how the interview will be structured, and that theyll have time to ask questions at the end. Tell them youll be asking for specific examples, not generalities, and that youll give them some time to think if they need it.