Every business is highly dependent on the supply and demand of human talent in different industries and professions. Desirable company culture and competitive starting salary play an important part in attracting and hiring employees for open vacancies. However, a good salary and an acceptable company culture aren’t enough for the modern employee, so the hiring process can be quite challenging. If done wrong, it can cost your company a lot of time and money, but if done right, hiring the perfect candidates will pay you back in employee productivity, a prosperous employment relationship, and an overall positive impact on a work environment.
When you have a great team of people working for you, you are directly enhancing your work culture, boosting employee morale, influencing positive, forward-thinking planning, and accomplishing big goals. This definitive guide on how to hire employees will help you get started and provide resources to make the process easier.
This blog post will teach you the basics of hiring for your company and how to make it a smooth process. We’ll start with explaining why it’s important to hire great employees, followed by who is responsible for hiring, and finally how to find qualified applicants. Hiring is an integral part of any successful business, so don’t skip this definitive guide to hiring!
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The Importance of Hiring the Right Employees
If you want to improve your hiring process, first, you must understand why it is important to hire the ‘right fit’ people for your company. Here are six reasons why:
1. It saves time – Once you hire a new person, they need to start adding to your productivity as a business, not taking away from it. However, the wrong person may ‘steal’ your time by requiring frequent follow-ups, retraining, and even prompting disciplinary action. Compared to good workers, these people can do damage to your business operations and keep you from doing your job. Hiring the right people eliminates these performance distractions and lets you focus on what is important – your company.
2. Fosters business growth – Hiring right lays the groundwork for the future. Getting the right people on board ensures they grow with the company, contributing to its overall success and reducing the need to hire again. Hiring good employees at even entry-level positions can lead to better-staffed positions in the future.
3. It reduces turnover costs – Of all the wasted money a company can suffer, turnover costs can be most frustrating. You invest time and money into an employee just to lose them for one reason or another. Turnover costs can make up 25% of the wage of the role you want to fill. You must ask yourself how many times you can afford to make the wrong hire?
4. It increases morale and team-building activities – Adding a bad hire can cause instant disruption in the workflow and connectivity of existing employees. But, if you hire the right employee, they will be ready to jump right in and contribute to the work of your best teams.
5. It stops you from losing money on training a bad hire – Hiring costs can be substantial, and when you add the time and money expenses of training a new employee, you have quite a sum invested in a single person. If this employee turns out to be a bad hire, you’ve just lost hours and hours of training and management on someone who will not stick around. But, if you hire the right person, the time and money used for their training will be well spent.
6. It protects your brand – There is nothing so repulsive to potential candidates as the fact that a company can’t keep their employees. Think of a bad hire as an announcement to the business world that you can’t seem to hold onto employees. Who would want to work with such a company?
Who is Responsible for Hiring Employees?
Both hiring managers and recruiters have an important role to play in helping a company find and retain top employees. So in order to attract, review, hire, and onboard promising employees, you will need to work closely with both parties.
The role of a recruiter is mainly focused on finding the right candidates for the open job position in the company. They use their expertise to build a solid pool of candidates where hiring managers will look to find their new hire, train hiring managers on the techniques of interviewing, and keep them on track so they can get back to candidates in a timely manner. The recruiters also recommend and put into practice effective assessment methods that help objectively evaluate prospective candidates. In short, recruiters make the job of hiring managers much easier and effortless. They are responsible for managing a recruitment process, but hiring managers are those who actually close the deal.
Hiring managers are employees, usually managers or supervisors, who are looking to fill a new position in the company. They are responsible for managing the job and a department into which a future employee will be integrated. Hiring managers are also responsible for: defining and scoping out the vacant job position, identifying the skills and qualifications a new hire will need, assigning a mentor for a new hire, their onboarding process, the integration of the new hire with the rest of the department’s staff, the overall direction of the new hire’s job, responsibilities, and objectives, and all other duties that come with the hiring manager’s role.
Since they instigate the need for a new employee, they preside over the team responsible for employee selection. Usually, they will first contact the recruiter and let them know about the need for a new employee. In most cases, they will write themselves a job description or ask the recruiter to create one. The recruiter will then source candidates and send resumes to a hiring manager, who will then interview the most promising candidates. Although other members of the employee selection team may give their opinion about the candidates, a hiring manager will be the one who will ultimately decide whether a candidate will be hired or not. Since a hiring manager is responsible for the recruiting process, they will have to investigate what went wrong if there is a bad hire.
The Role of a Hiring Manager in Recruiting
A hiring manager has multiple duties throughout every stage of the recruiting process. Even if the recruiter has done their job perfectly, providing a shortlist of up-and-coming candidates, a hiring manager will still have to dig into candidates’ abilities and decide who is the ‘perfect fit.’ Therefore, only a hiring manager is able to:
- Evaluate candidates, detect their potential, and reject those candidates who look good on paper but lack the necessary skills;
- Inform a recruiter that they need to continue looking for good candidates if there hasn’t been a suitable candidate identified yet, instead of settling with a wrong option; and
- Impact the candidate’s decision to accept the job offer.
What do Hiring Managers Look for in a Candidate?
The most common thing that every hiring manager will say they look for in a candidate is that they are a ‘perfect fit.’ Although this is a pretty vague term, it basically includes a combination of factors, like perspective, skills, enthusiasm for the job and the company, punctuality, professionalism, and a personality alignment with the team. If a candidate wants to communicate to hiring managers that they are a perfect fit, they must:
- Understand the company culture;
- Find out who will do their interview so they can leave the best impression;
- Talk to existing employees in order to get a better perspective of the company, their culture, workplace, and anything else that can form a solid picture of what the company is looking for in a new hire;
- Be ready to demonstrate their skills and the relevance of their work experience; and
- Practice their interview skills.
How to Find Qualified Employees?
Hiring the perfect person for your company starts with the analysis of the vacant job position. The analysis enables you to collect necessary information about the skills, duties, responsibilities, outcomes, and work environment of the job in question. The information you acquire from the job analysis is vital to developing the job description for the new employee. This will help you plan and develop a recruiting strategy for hiring the perfect person for your organization.
The second step is to create a talent-focused job description. If you want to recruit the best of the best talent, you need to create an exciting job description. To do so, you will have to 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 be everything but fit for your company.
Make sure to stay clear from the traditional bullet list of job prerequisites, responsibilities, and duties because requirement-focused and responsibility-based job descriptions can alienate potential candidates, preventing them from applying. Focus on what your company can do for potential candidates than on your expectations for the new employee.
Once you have your job description, you need to set up a recruiting planning meeting that involves employees who are hiring new team members. This is where a hiring manager comes into play because they can help you plan a recruiting strategy and decide who is the best candidate after the interviews are over. Another thing that can help you in deciding is a hiring checklist, which can systematize your hiring process, allowing you to keep track of your recruiting efforts and communicate progress to the hiring manager and interested employees.
After you’ve created your job description and made a perfect recruiting strategy, it is time to set things in motion. Avoid posting your job ad exclusively to job board sites. Expand your reach by turning to social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and even Instagram. These platforms allow you to reach the perfect candidates, especially those from the younger generations, like Millennials and Gen Z.
Before you commence the interview process, it is vital that you do a pre-screening of the candidates. While a potential candidate can look good on paper, a pre-screening interview will tell you if this is true or if their qualifications don’t fit the job. Additionally, during a pre-screening interview, you can find out if their salary expectations match the job description.
Try to avoid the typical job interview where you ask generic questions and go through their resume and opt for a more interesting way of interviewing a candidate. If you want to hire the best talent, consider taking your interview out of the room and into the office. This will help you see how the candidate interacts with your employees and whether they are excited about joining your company or not.
Although it is necessary to use skills and education as the benchmarks for perfect candidates, you should also know that hard skills can be learned, but the right personality and people skills cannot. Make sure to find candidates who will be a perfect fit with your employees and your company culture. Since a passion for joining a company and willingness to work are crucial in new candidates, be ready to assess their soft skills and overall personality.
Good candidates are prepared for all the usual questions, and they will be ready to impress you by finding clever ways to turn any negatives into positives, showing no weakness. Nevertheless, this strategy tends to backfire since it makes a candidate seem too perfect and less honest. Go beyond typical interview questions and develop your own to understand better what a candidate is actually like. Interesting questions can reveal a lot about a candidate, such as ‘What is your natural strength?’ or What do people usually misunderstand about you?’
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.
One thing is very important – no matter how much you are in a hurry to find a new employee, you should never rush the hiring process. In other words, don’t hire the first person that ‘seems okay.’ If your first 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.
Once you’ve found the perfect candidate for your company, it’s time to move quickly. Don’t stall with making a decision and extend the job offer right away. Remember, the demand for skilled employees is very high, so you don’t want to wait and risk losing a potential candidate to other hiring opportunities.
The last step in the hiring process is bringing a new employee onboard. This is important 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 pair the new hire with a more experienced employee who can mentor them during their early days in the office. Provide them orientation, explain your company’s core values and expectations, go over their job responsibilities, assign a mentor, and give them a starting project right away.
Additionally, if you’re looking to hire a remote employee, you should pay special attention to these areas:
- The recruitment stage, because you need to find an employee who actually does what they claim; and
- Detailed onboarding because you can easily lose new remote employees due to poorly done onboarding.
Here are a couple of steps you should take to make this process successful:
- Set their credentials and logins in order as well as their work equipment before their first day;
- Give them a hearty welcome;
- Set up a video introduction with the new employee’s team so they can feel welcome and an equal part of the workforce; and
- Be available for their questions
Conclusion
Talent is the most important component of every successful company, and yet, the shortage of talent has become a serious problem nowadays. That is why hiring new employees can be a challenging and time-consuming task. It takes a lot of work and dedication, but it pays in the long run because having the right employees will keep your company healthy and growing. Fortunately, this guide can help you find the best of the best talent.
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.