Speak to most managers and company owners and, chances are, you’ll find that hiring and firing staff appears at or near the top of their lists of least pleasant responsibilities. While employing the right staff is vital to the success of any company, the process of advertising vacancies, sorting through applications, interviewing applicants and eventually onboarding team members can eat precious time and resources.
Moreover, many managers would openly admit they lack the in-depth people and psychology skills required for assessing prospective jobseekers at the application and interview stage, often resulting in them left feeling completely out of their depth.
Tips to make hiring staff in your firm easier
For the reasons noted above, trying to find the right staff to join your team can often feel like a laborious, stressful task, but thankfully, there are some tried-and-tested tips that might help. Read on for some ideas on how to build the ideal team in your company and identify the right applicant for your vacancy.
Be clear about what you’re looking for
There’s little point in posting a wooly job description in your vacancy advert as you’ll attract all sorts from all backgrounds with varying levels of skills and experience. Instead, you should write a clear job description at the outset, so both you know and prospective job seekers know exactly what’s required. If you’re not sure how to do this you could follow the next point …
Hire an HR company to help
With the advent of web tech and increasingly sophisticated online tools, HR has come along leaps and bounds in recent years – including the development of third-party, remote HR services. Enlisting the help of an HR company in your recruitment process (or more), will dramatically reduce the amount of work you have to do plus could also improve your internal processes.
Think about employing behavioral testing in your interview strategy
As mentioned above, there is a considerable skill needed to conduct an interview that is both relaxed yet formal, inviting yet structured. Perhaps more importantly, even if you get the balance right and manage to get your applicants speaking freely and comfortably, if you don’t have background knowledge, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to pick up on the subtler cues and body psychology hints that applicants often unwittingly display.
Before you make the move in hiring candidates for your business, give them behavioral assessment tests to gain insight into their personality. Often these unseen signals can reveal a deeper side to their personality and give you faith they’re right for the job.
Prepare your questions properly in advance
You should avoid taking an off-the-cuff approach to your interviews as doing so could result in you losing direction and, potentially, projecting an unprofessional image to the interviewee. While it’s good to try and keep things relatively informal, it’s also important to keep control over proceedings and lend direction to your conversations – so you should prepare your interview questions well in advance.
Also, if you don’t have pre-prepared questions, you run the risk of asking different applicants different things, which will make post-interview comparisons between candidates almost impossible.