Practical tips for improving your company hiring effectiveness
Most business owners and CEOs would agree that their employees are a critical factor in helping their business succeed. Underpinning this is the ability to hire and retain the right people. Let’s focus this week on the “hire” phase and specifically the art of interviewing.
Many managers never receive formal training on how to conduct an effective interview. This is a big missed opportunity for owners and CEOs in building the value, or net worth, of their company given the time our managers may spend each year interviewing for new employees and making hiring decisions. Here are practical tips to discuss with your team on how to enhance the interviewing process at your company:
- Start with “deliverables” in mind. Too often hiring managers start by drafting a job description that usually includes a very broad overview of the role they are hiring for. Writing the job description should be the second step. The first is identifying what this employee will be responsible for doing in terms of “deliverable(s)” for the business. Identify how the hiring manager will define what good looks like in terms of this new hires job performance (deliverables) at the end of their first 3 months, 6 months and first full year. Giving quality thought to what deliverables you will need from this new hire will greatly increase the liklihood of your finding and onboarding the right person.
- With the deliverable(s) now in mind, craft the job description that will outline more accurately what the role is that will be able to achieve your desired deliverable(s). Instead of putting in the kitchen sink of responsibilities, experience and characteristics in the job description, knowing the deliverables you’re looking for will help you craft a more focused position description.
- With the job description written, the third step is crafting effective interview questions by looking at the deliverable(s) you’ve set for this position and identify questions that will help you directly see if the candidate possesses the experience and characteristics you know will be needed. Certainly, there are standard questions you can ask in most any interview for any job type, but you also want to add custom questions specific to the role you are hiring for. If you only stick to your standard stable of questions, you may miss interviewing the candidate for specifically what will be needed to help them achieve the deliverable(s) you need in a particular role.
Talk with your team about how effective your company is at hiring and of course retaining employees. But too often managers talk more about the retention aspect and miss the power of the initial step, the interviewing and hiring. Discuss where your team could improve in the interviewing process and in doing this you could be taking a powerful step forward in strengthening your hiring of the right talent that can then help you build the future net worth of your company.
