The hiring process can be costly and time-consuming; finding quality candidates sooner rather than later is crucial.
If you want high-quality candidates who provide a clear return on investment and stick around for the long haul, you’ll want to implement a sound hiring strategy.
In this guide, we’ll provide a few tips to help you bring the right people to your organization.
1. Run a Background Check On Candidates
Background checks help you avoid bad hires since they verify the accuracy of the information candidates provide.
But you may be wondering, what does a background check show? There are many types of checks, such as:
- Employment and education verification
- Criminal history
- Credit checks
- Reference checks
- Driving record
- Drug screening
You’re investing a lot of money into finding the right person for the position. It saves you the time and headache of repeatedly starting the hiring process. And it’ll also ensure that your workplace is safe. The last thing you’d want to do is hire someone with an extensive criminal record.
That said, make sure to get consent and avoid any discrimination when running background checks.
2. Know Where to Look
Finding great candidates means going to the right pool of job seekers. The more qualified applicants you have to work with, the better your chances of finding the right one. And if you decide to scale your efforts in the future, you’ll have a large pool of past candidates to work with.
Generally, the best places to find candidates are:
- General job board: There are hundreds of job boards. While you’re sure to get a lot of unqualified applicants, this is the best place to receive many new candidates.
- Specific job boards: Companies looking for specialists should look at industry-specific job boards. This is where you’ll find higher-quality candidates unique to the position.
- Employee referrals: Your employees are likely friends with other people who do the same line of work. You can ask for recommendations from your team to find new applicants. Make sure to give them a nice bonus for any referrals that become new hires.
- Your own networks: You should reach out to contacts you’ve developed over the years. Networking events and career workshops are great places to find good leads for potential new hires.
- Talent solution firms: Employment agencies specializing in recruiting will help remove a lot of pressure off your team to find the right candidates.
3. Prepare Well-Structured Interviews
You’ll want an evaluation scorecard to grade and compare the candidate’s performance on set criteria when conducting interviews.
With serious contenders, you should have more than one conversation with them and include multiple people in the process, such as a manager, an HR person, and even the CEO.
It’s a good idea to use behavior-based interviewing techniques. You would invite candidates to describe how they would handle specific challenges or situations. You can ask them to draw from situations they had in the past since this could be a great indicator of future performance.
Wrapping It Up
While some entrepreneurs have great instincts about whether someone is right for the job, you shouldn’t rely on gut feelings.
Your recruitment decision should ultimately come down to objective factors. Add these strategies to your hiring process and document the steps to relay the information to your recruitment team.
