The process to hire the right employees for your company can be challenging and risky. Why? Because hiring the wrong people is expensive, costly to your business operations and work environment, and time-consuming. On the other hand, if done properly, hiring the right people will pay you back in employee productivity, a prosperous employment relationship, and an overall positive impact on your work environment.

When you hire the right employees, you directly enhance your work culture, boost employee morale, influence positive, forward-thinking planning, and accomplish ambitious goals. A good hire also ensures that you are making the most of the time and energy your existing employees are investing in a relationship with the new hire, which is a costly and emotional process.

This blog post will go over the right strategies needed to ensure you are making the best possible choice every time. Here are 14 helpful steps for identifying and hiring the right employees for your company.

Ready to start? Contact CIBR Warriors for the fastest way to qualified employees!

Define the Job Position

Hiring the perfect employee starts with the analysis of the job position. This analysis enables you to collect necessary information about the duties, skills, responsibilities, outcomes, and work environment of the job in question. The information you get from the job analysis is crucial to developing the job description for the new hire. This will help you plan a recruiting strategy for hiring the perfect employee for your company.

Create a Talent-focused Job Description

If you want to recruit the best talent, you need to create an interesting job description. It’s just like marketing – you need to fully understand the type of candidate you want to attract and then write a job description that appeals directly to such a person. Otherwise, you will risk attracting unqualified candidates who will not be a perfect fit for your company.

Also, stay clear from the traditional bullet list of job prerequisites, duties, and responsibilities, because requirement-focused and responsibility-based job descriptions can alienate potential candidates and prevent them from applying. Creating a job description that focuses on what your company can do for potential candidates can have a higher response rate than focusing only on your expectations for the new employee.

Plan an Employee Recruiting Strategy

Now that you have your job description, you can set up a recruiting planning meeting that involves those employees who are hiring the new team member. The hiring manager is crucial in this situation because he will help you plan a recruiting strategy and decide who is the best candidate after the interviews are over.

Use a Checklist

A hiring checklist will help you systematize your hiring process, allowing you to keep track of your recruiting efforts and communicate progress to the hiring manager and interested employees.

Get Creative

Once you’ve created your job description and made a perfect recruiting strategy, it is time to set things in motion. Don’t just post your job ad to job board sites. Make sure to expand your reach by turning to social media platforms. Posting your job offer on LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Instagram can help you reach the perfect candidates, especially those from the younger generation.

Prescreen Candidates

The biggest reason for pre screening candidates is that it saves both your and the interviewing committee’s time. While a potential employee may look good on paper, a pre screening interview will tell you if this is the case or if their qualifications don’t fit the open job position. Additionally, during a pre screening interview, you can find out if their salary expectations are compatible with the job position.

Avoid the Typical Job Interview

The job interview process is usually a game well-rehearsed, especially in larger organizations. It typically goes like this: you and your candidate sit across the table, recapping their resume and asking generic questions about their skills and experience. If you want to hire the best person for your team, you should consider taking your interview in a different direction, namely, out of the interview room and into the rest of the office. This will help you see how the candidates will interact with your employees and whether they seem excited about joining your business or not. 

Look for Employees With the Right Personality

When reviewing resumes, it is common to use education and specific skill sets as benchmarks for finding perfect candidates. However, you should know that hard skills can be acquired, but the right personality and people skills cannot. Focus on finding candidates who will fit with your current employees and your company culture. A passion to join your company and willingness to work is fundamental in new candidates, so you will want to assess the candidate’s soft skills and overall personality.

Throw a Curveball or Two

In general, candidates are prepared for all the typical interview questions. They will try to impress you by finding clever ways to turn negatives into positives, showing no weakness or vulnerability. Still, this strategy tends to backfire since it makes a candidate seem less honest and trustworthy. Go beyond the typical questions and develop your own to understand better what a candidate is actually like. Some of these interview questions that can reveal a lot about candidates are: What is your natural strength? What qualities of your parents do you appreciate the most? What do people misunderstand about you?

Don’t Settle

Even if you are in a hurry to find a new employee, you mustn’t rush the hiring process and settle for the first candidate that walks through your door. If your group of applicants isn’t successful, go back through the initial hiring steps rather than hire someone who will be a bad match for the position. Even if you can’t seem to find the talent you need, you may want to consider promoting one of your existing employees who is looking for a new challenge.

Check Their Background and References

Adequate background checks are one of the crucial steps when hiring a new employee. It would be best if you verified that your potential hire actually possesses all the presented credentials, skills, and experience. The background check must include:

• Work references (especially former supervisors).
• Educational credentials.
• Employment references and previously held jobs.
• Criminal history.

Move Quickly

If you think you’ve found the perfect candidate for the position, you must move quickly. Don’t delay in making a decision and extend the job offer. Since the demand for skilled employees is pretty high, you will not want to wait and risk losing a potential hire to other hiring opportunities.

Bring a New Employee Onboard

Once you’ve committed to a new hire, you should properly bring them onboard. This is because the retention rate of new employees can be increased by 40% if you have a solid orientation program. Besides training, you will want to consider pairing the new hire with a more experienced employee who can mentor them during their early days in the workplace. In short, you will want to give them orientation, explain your company’s core values and expectations, go over job responsibilities, assign a mentor, and start a project right away.

Hiring Remote Employees

If you are looking to hire remote employees, you should pay special attention to two particular areas – the recruitment stage, because you have to find an employee who actually does what they claim, and detailed onboarding, because you can quickly lose new remote employees if the onboarding is poorly done. Because remote onboarding can be a challenging task, here are a couple of steps you can take to make this process efficient:

Set them up before their first day. Make sure their credentials and logins are in order, and they have all the necessary work equipment.

Give them a hearty welcome. This may sound basic, but it can be beneficial in the long run. Set up a video introduction with the new employee’s team so they can feel welcome and an equal part of the workforce. Remember, they are entering your company at a different point from where others have started, so making them feel welcome can be highly beneficial to your organization.

Be available. Your new employee will undoubtedly have questions, but he will not be able to just come to you or other teammates and ask them. Making yourself available is vital in a world of remote onboarding.

Hundreds of new candidates are looking for job openings every day, and CIBR Warriors are there to help you find the right one for you. For more help on advancing your network administrator career, contact us. We’d be happy to answer your questions and provide you with the best advice for getting started.