How To Hire Employees – Get the Right Person the First Time
I know a business owner who touted his ability to hire employees based just on their resumes.
“If the resume checks the right boxes, they’re right for the job,” he told me.
He thought he was being efficient. I knew he was being short-sighted.
He didn’t connect the dots between his hiring “efficiency” and his company’s sky-high turnover.
Another business owner I know only hired people she liked and were just like her. If she liked you, odds are she hired you. She also told me that it was painful when she had to let people go due to performance (which was more often than she wanted).
In both cases, the owners did not realize how much their hiring practices cost them. Bad hires are like a virus. They weaken you while they’re around. They cost a ton to get rid of. And, your recovery (that’s IF you recover) diverts time and energy from the things you want or need to do.
But when it comes to hiring employees, you can prevent and cure the virus. Here’s how:
Invest More in the Effort
Efficiency is nice, but not when it means taking shortcuts. Too many businesses short-cut the hiring process. If you have to move quickly, invest in hiring someone who can accelerate the process without taking shortcuts.
If you’re managing the process in-house, be prepared to sift through hundreds of resumes, talk with at least 75% of those, interview half of those; all of which requires more than a resume scan or personality match. That takes time. That requires investment.
Speaking of investment, you might get your best return by relying on a trusted third party — such as a staffing agency — to help you find the right people. Firms like Snelling maintain pipelines of qualified job-seekers and have perfected strategies to identify the winners.
Yes, you invest to get the help, but the return on the investment is great: fewer failed hires, less back-tracking, and less time spent managing the hiring process.
Don’t Check ALL The Boxes
I once hired an office assistant who was a teacher that had never worked in an office setting. Crazy, huh!? Actually, not so crazy. She checked the most important boxes for me (more on that below) so I knew she’d be a good hire.
Employers typically come up with a list of “job-skills” and then they rate applicants based on how many of those skills they possess. That’s a recipe for hiring failure, especially if you weigh that job-skills test more heavily than more important tests.
That assistant WAS a great hire. By the end of her first week, we had trained her on how to use all the different software programs. By the end of the first month, she taught me some things I didn’t know.
I could have predicted that…
…which leads to the third, and most important tip.
Hire Applicants Who Are Trainable
I don’t need to like you. I don’t need to match your resume with every box on the job-skills checklist. But I do need to confirm that you are:
- Trainable and
- Open to constructive feedback.
If you check those two boxes and have a good foundation of job skills, I will usually hire you with confidence — because I know you’ll develop the other job skills quickly. And I know you’ll be the kind of employee who grows in the job and sticks.
How do you know if an applicant is trainable and open to feedback?
Well…that’s part of Snelling’s secret formula on how to hire employees that I won’t publish on a blog.
But if you want to schedule a free consultation with me, I’d be happy to discuss your hiring needs with you and reveal some of the ways we’ll help you prevent and cure the bad-hire virus.
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