Is Your Hiring Process the Difference Between Being a Good Company, and a Great Company?

By Jezabel Southard

Posted on May 24, 2013

Hiring connects your company to its employees for the first time. It’s a key part of creating a talented team that can drive a business toward its goals. Unfortunately, because hiring requires time, money, and energy outside the company’s regular goals, it can seem like a second-rate priority – and be treated accordingly.

Despite the importance of hiring, many companies don’t plan the interviewing process thoroughly. Instead, they cobble together a process that often looks like this:

• Resumes are collected and screened, and the most viable choices are called in for interviews.

• Interviews are conducted by an employee or panel of employees who, while they may have daily contact with the position being hired for, are not trained or experienced in hiring and often lack the leadership or knowledge they need to make the best hiring decisions.

• Questions asked during the interview are redundant and/or do not sell the position to the candidate. They may also fail to address key issues like a candidate’s “fit” with the company’s culture or ethics.

• Decision makers struggle to identify the best candidate based on the interview, often because the interview failed to glean answers to the most pressing questions.

• The panel hires a candidate who is later asked to pitch in with hiring despite knowing little about the process, and the cycle repeats.

How to Break the Cycle

The interview cycle described above breaks down at two points. First, it fails to build a candidate pool stocked with top-notch, qualified candidates. Second, it asks employees to find the best candidate in the pool without giving them the tools they need to do so.

Luckily, both breakdown points can be addressed with one solution: effective recruiting strategies. By devising and executing an effective strategy, you will be able break the cycle of bad hiring decisions. Here are a couple of items to consider integrating into your strategy:

Behavioral interview training. More often than not, the individuals tasked with interviewing candidates are untrained interviewers. By offering behavioral interview training opportunities, your staff will be able to ask the right interview questions and present the company in its best possible light to top talent.

Planning the interview process. Interviewing isn’t as simple as just posting a job description and interviewing the candidates as they come in. The interview needs to be structured and well planned to ensure that the candidate’s competencies and true colors are revealed. Planning the interview will also help interviewers cut down on redundant or irrelevant questions by preparing them for interviewing and defining each participant’s role. This makes interviewing more efficient by eliciting better information in less time.

At TERRA Staffing, our skilled recruiters can help you build a hiring process that will help you identify – and hire –top talent. Our “RightFit” screening process unlocks access to the industry’s top performers. Contact us today to learn more!

Categories: Employee Engagement Ideas, Staffing Tips & Recruiting Trends

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