Hire Better Employees
Got a job opening? If so, it could be straining your business. Being down even one person could hurt productivity. But don’t let your sense of urgency cause you to make a hasty, regrettable hire. Business owners frequently feel the pressure to fill crucial roles quickly. But there is a lot of risk associated with making a quick hire.
Identifying The Risks
If you aren’t thorough as you source, interview and select your candidates, and don’t fully understand their knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences, you’re more likely to have a bad hire.
Essentially, a bad hire is someone who comes on board and doesn’t perform as expected. And if a bad hire ends in a termination, you’re looking at extra costs, including:
- Paying out medical, dental and vision insurance
- Unemployment compensation
- Time and energy to fill the role again
But these aren’t the only costs you could face. What if your bad hire commits fraud? Fraud adds a whole other set of costs. That’s why it’s so important to do your due diligence and hire the all-around best candidate.
Listen to episode 93, “Human Resources 101: Hiring & Retaining Top Talent, on Rea’s award-winning podcast, unsuitable on Rea Radio, featuring Desiree Lyon.
Breaking Down The Risk
So how do you go about properly hiring a new candidate? Start by breaking down each section of the recruiting cycle:
- Sourcing: Consider where you’re going to find candidates for your open position. Think about where your top performing employees came from. Or perhaps solicit employee referrals and see if your current employees know any good candidates. Casting a wide net isn’t always the best strategy for small businesses – it can start to feel like finding a needle in a haystack. A talent agency can help you find the right candidates if you can’t handle this in-house.
- Screening: At this point in the recruiting cycle, you should have a good number of résumés to sift through to determine who to talk to. During this phase, you want to assess candidates based on your expectations for the position. Don’t blindly screen applicants. Instead, consider developing assessments to measure an applicant’s knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences. Phone interviews are also a good way to gauge whether or not you want to further pursue an applicant. Much like any quality control process, be sure to have checks and balances in place during this phase.
- Interviewing: This is the most critical phase of the recruiting cycle. Where you, and hopefully other staff members, meet with your candidates face-to-face. There’s a long list of “dos and don’ts” when it comes to interviewing, but one thing’s for sure. You’ll want to interview the candidates multiple times, and have other members of the team weigh in.
- Selecting: During this phase, you should select the candidate who best meets your needs. Before moving forward with a selection, you should also get your team’s input and be sure that your offer is in line with your candidate’s expectations (this is information you should gather during the interviewing phase).
Don’t blindly screen applicants. Instead, consider developing assessments to measure an applicant’s knowledge, skills, abilities and experiences.
Read Also: Does Vacation Time Matter?
Ways to Reduce The Risk
When you make the hire, there are several ways you can reduce the risk of a good hire turning sour.
- Ensure your new employees are adequately “on-boarded.” Make sure they understand your business’s culture, systems and processes, and help them to get to know the rest of your team.
- Consider requiring pre-employment drug testing, criminal background checks and/or financial credit checks.
- Review (or in some cases, develop) your business’s policies and procedures to ensure they support a culture that alleviates workplace risk. Review them with a legal professional who understands labor and employment laws, and repeat every three years.
Ultimately, if you take your time and place importance on getting the right people into open positions within your company, you’ll likely reduce risk in the long-term.
by Renee West, SHRM-SCP, PHR (New Philadelphia office)
Looking for more tips to help you hire better? Check out these resources:
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