When you have decided it is time to bring someone new on board, you need to ensure you hire the right person for the available role. If the wrong person is hired, it could have serious detrimental effects on your business such as unrest in the office, deadlines not being met and an atmosphere which isn’t appealing. All in all, if you hire poorly, it can really affect everything about your business. Not only will have you wasted your time and money in the recruiting and hiring process, you will also have to spend time fixing the problem.
It may also lead you to go down a process of making people redundant, which can add extra expense and can sometimes be time consuming. In the meantime, company drive, your reputation as an employer and customer service may have suffered. When you go through a redundancy process, in the future you may need to hire more people again – and this can be pricey as you will need to cater for your new employees especially in regards to office space. However, Oasis Group document storage may provide a feasible answer, or you could set up days allocated to allow people to work from home.
There are a number of things you can do to help yourself in selecting the best candidate for your business and for the job. Some of the more common ones are resume screening, interviewing, testing and reference checking.
Resume screening
The point of screening a resume is to verify if the applicant has the necessary knowledge and skills needed to do the job. You should create a list of qualifications that a successful candidate must have. Look for these qualifications when reviewing resumes. If the applicant lacks any of the qualifications, you eliminate him or her from consideration. For example, if you are recruiting a sous chef, you might want to be firm on previous cooking experience, and only candidates who have this experience are requested for an interview. On a realistic basis, the more resumes you have for any particular role, the more rigorous you can be in developing a must-have list.
Interviewing
There are three critical elements that a candidate must have in order to thrive within a job: knowledge, skills and attitude. From resume screening, you can typically determine if a candidate has (or at least claims to have) the basic knowledge and skills to do the job. It takes an interview to determine if he or she really does. Also, the interview is the best place to determine attitude.
When interviewing, most of your questions should be open-ended to support conversation. These questions usually begin with “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “tell me about” or “describe.” Closed questions are used only when you require a definite answer. All of your questions must be linked to the needs of your job and not prejudiced from a human-rights perspective. For example, if the job involves shift work, you could ask, “Is there anything that would limit you from working shifts?” rather than “Who will look after your children if you have to work shifts?”
When interviewing, it is important to explore the candidate’s experience to authenticate his or her skill set. The best analyst of future behaviour is past behaviour. For example, if a part of the job is working under pressure for periods of time, you might ask your candidates to describe a job where they worked under stress. Remember, if you ask a theoretical question (“what would you do if….”), you will get a hypothetical answer, and some candidates have enough imagination to create some surprising answers. Your hiring decision should be based on facts, not assumption.
Testing
Running a test may help in understanding if the candidate is qualified, skilled enough or has the abilities to carry out the job. Testing can contain a wide range from cooking a dish, formatting a spreadsheet or handling a guest complaint; so it is important that you decide whether testing is needed for the position you are hiring for and if what is being tested is applicable to the candidate successfully performing the job.
Reference checks
Check at least two business references on each finalist. It is common for a lot of applicants to exaggerate their employment history. By checking references, you are authenticating the information you have received to make sure that your candidate has the knowledge, skills and attitude they have presented.
It is important not to rush into hiring someone new. Take your time, and think carefully about who you will offer the job to.
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