If you’re in charge of hiring at your company, there are certain factors that might affect your decision making capabilities when it comes to filling a vacancy. Lack of time, limited hiring budget, and unqualified talent may all impede your hiring process. While better candidate choice, smart filtration tools, and fresh data will help in making your hiring process easier.
There are many precautionary measure to take nowadays to avoid a bad hiring decision, and today we’ll be discussing four of them. But, why is avoiding a bad hire so important for organizations? Well, a bad hiring decision might affect your team’s productivity, cost you money, and waste your time.
In a business environment where everything is fast paced and always evolving, wasting time, decreasing productivity, and overspending are not things that companies usually tolerate. To stay ahead of the game, even when it comes to choosing your employees, a hiring decision needs to be well-thought-out and certain factors need to be looked at in depth.
1. Start with the Basics - Gather the Right Information
In order to avoid a bad hire, you’ll need to have as much information about your candidate as possible. Before searching for this information, you’ll need to breakdown the job description related to your vacancy and highlight certain requirements that you’re looking for. Once you’ve broken down the job description, you’ll have a clearer idea of what skills are required in order to fulfill the job tasks properly.
After you’ve done that, you’ll need to start looking at CVs to compare skills and experience with what your vacancy requires. If at this point you feel like something is vague on a CV, or a certain piece of information that you need seems to be missing, it would be best to either reach out to the candidate and ask for this information yourself, or overlook the CV at hand and continue on to the next one.
Since different positions require different sets of skills and various levels of experience, you’ll need to breakdown the position you’re hiring for and imagine what the perfect candidate possesses in terms of qualifications, technical skills, and possibly their culture fit.
Let’s assume you’re looking to fill a vacancy in your sales department. This is a critical position, even if it’s for a junior level vacancy. Why? Because sales people are indirectly the front of your organization. They’re the employees who go out to meet potential clients, and take care of your existing clients in order to retain them. Therefore, a bad hire in the sales department can cause your image as an organization to be harmed, as well as affect your reputation with other potential clients.
To avoid this, looking for certain things such as great communication skills, presentability, negotiation skills, and spreadsheet expertise is essential for a sales position. If you believe that a candidate that you’re screening/interviewing doesn’t have these basic necessary skills, it’s time to move on.
2. Screening Process and Phone Interviews
So, you’ve broken down your job description, and you know exactly what you’re looking for in your next hire. Now, it’s time to start screening your candidates one by one.
When it comes to screening talent and finding a qualified candidate, you can use Bayt.com CV Search and utilize 33+ filtration tools to control the search results that are presented to you. Now, you can search for specific keywords and use your advanced boolean search operators to filter your results even further. This will make the display of your search results much more relevant and enhance the speed of your screening process.
Let’s say you now have a bunch candidates that you need to contact for phone interviews. But, before you pick up the phone and start dialing away, prepare a list of specific questions that cover important areas of the job description that you’ve already broken down.
For example, if you need someone who’s previously managed a team, or you need to know if your candidate has experience in certain programs such as Adobe Illustrator and the likes, make sure to ask detailed questions about their experience in those fields.
Also, ask personal questions about experiences and challenges they’ve faced at the workplace and how they handled them. This should help you build a better idea of what their character is like, and how they’re likely to behave in the workplace.
Finally, you can prepare an assignment for your candidates depending on the vacancy they’ll be filling. For example, if you’re hiring a copywriter, sending them a sample to edit/review would be a good assignment choice to help you assess their skills even further.
All of these assessments that occur during the phone interview will help improve the quality of the candidates you shortlist for the face-to-face interview. But, keep in mind that phone interviews do not always reflect the outcome of face-to-face interviews. Most candidates may get caught off guard by your phone call and become a little tense or nervous, so always try to make sure that it’s a good time to be speaking to your potential candidate about a job opportunity.
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3. Face-to-Face Interviews and Body Language
You’ve made it this far and the hard part is almost over. Face-to-face interviews can be pretty standard. Some might even say that it’s just a more in depth phone interview that allows you to assess a candidate even further. But, there’s still a chance that something may happen in one of your interviews that will change your whole outlook on your candidate.
When speaking to your interviewee, and aside from assessing their skills and their preparation for the interview, make sure to keep an eye on the way the candidates carry themselves during the conversation, and pay attention to their body language. If a candidate is slouching, laid back, or keeps moving further away from you, those are all signs that may suggest that a candidate is not interested in the job you’re offering, haven’t prepared enough, or are lacking confidence.
If you sense that the candidate is simply nervous, be sure to comfort your interviewee and ease their nervousness. But if that doesn’t work, then it might be time to consider that they are not fully equipped and interested.
On the flip side, if you feel like your candidate is interested, keeps leaning forward, is engaged in the conversation, and makes an effort to recap on important points or topics, then this is a person who is seriously invested in the vacancy you’re offering.
If you’d like to go the extra mile to ensure your candidates are qualified and capableof performing the job you’re offering them, take a look at Bayt.com Employer tests. With over 300 tests from Bayt.com, you can test candidates in various areas including psychometrics, languages, skills, and job knowledge.You’ll also be able to grade, analyze, and rank your candidates from their results.
4. Candidate Background Checks
Often times, social media users share their personal opinions and beliefs publicly without thinking about the repercussions. This includes job seekers too. Although we can’t control everyone’s beliefs and opinions, let alone their right to share them online, recruiters sometimes need to check potential candidates and see what they’ve been up to on social media.
The world of social media allows us to do a little digging on the candidate that we’d like to hire. Of course, as employers, we should respect the privacy of others just like we’d like others to respect our own privacy. But, at the same time, it would be hard to ignore that a potential candidate is politically outspoken and would probably harm the company’s image with their activities outside the workplace. Or even worse, imagine stumbling across a post where a candidate is bad mouthing their previous manager!
Of course, there are more professional items that potential candidates might mention or share on their social media profiles such as their previous job title, a personal portfolio of their work, or even personal views and thoughts that remain within the professional boundaries as we know them.
When searching the internet for information on job seekers, be wary of what you stumble upon and really try to think of whether or not your potential hire fits organization.
If you don’t feel comfortable digging up social media dirt, there are other things you can do to check on their qualifications. For example, it’s customary for employers to ask candidates for references (if they haven’t already been provided on their CV). Calling references is always a sure way of finding out whether or not the candidate at hand is suitable for your vacancy.
Not all of us can predict the future. And, not all of us know the right thing to do all the time. But, we hope that this blog has given you certain precautionary measures to help you avoid bad hires.
To help you screen your talent quickly and efficiently, be sure to start a free trial of Bayt.com CV Search and pick the right hire.
This article originally appeared in Bayt.com. This article and all other intellectual property on Bayt.com is the property of Bayt.com. Reproduction of this article in any form is only permissible with written permission from Bayt.com.
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