Small-business owners know the challenge, frustration and cost of hiring. On average, companies could turn over 62 per cent more if their whole team was close to being as good as their best staff member. How many times have we hired someone we thought would be great who ended up not working out?
Success of hiring falls into these two broad categories:
- Having a screening process that identifies the most valuable aspects of a candidate. This is an actual funnel you take your candidates through so you minimise your hiring risk and know who you are hiring before putting them in the role.
- Acquiring a volume of diverse applicants.
Designing the right screening process
In order to minimise hiring risk, you must design your process so you know how likely a candidate will work out before putting them into the role and trialling them out.
- Determine if they’re an overachiever.
Interview them in a way where you know what was expected of them in previous and current roles, and how they performed against this expectation. This is vastly different to checking out their knowledge, which is secondary in importance. - Ensure they fit your knowledge and experience requirements.
Knowledge and experience do not equate to productivity. If you previously thought you needed someone with three years’ experience, you may reduce this to 2 for the right person. Anywhere you can you want to reduce the limits you put on a potential candidate. - Ensure they have the right personality.
There’s no easy way to do this, in fact we haven’t found one without using an accurate Personality Profile. You cannot possibly know someone’s personality from first impressions. Some of the most “dull” people are actually dark horses you couldn’t live without and vice versa, add to this the facade people put on in interviews. We recommend not using what you think you see as a yardstick of someone’s personality. - Verify all of their achievement claims.
78 per cent of people lie during the hiring process and the only way to know is Reference Checking and 30 per cent of candidates we put through Reference Checking don’t pass. This is hands down the most important step.
Ensuring enough people apply – 3x your ad applicants
Job ads must be looked at in the same light as standard customer marketing; designed for a specific targeted audience that sells solutions to very real problems. This means the first intention has to be attracting as many applicants to you as possible. There are ways you can increase your applicants by 2-3x.
- Write interesting job ad titles that make you stand out like a sore thumb. Be creative with ad titles so you gain as much interest as possible. Come up with new ways to describe the role in a way that leads to clicks.
- Post ads across multiple categories. Cross-placing ads can up your applicants by 100 per cent. The idea is you create different archetypes of people who could be successful in this role. A junior you could train, an experienced person who can start immediately, someone with parallel qualifications in a completely different field you could convince to transfer, etc. Each archetype is a new opportunity for you to place an ad in a different category.
- Structure the ad so they cannot stop reading. Most job ads are dry. Change it up by writing something they can’t stop reading by speaking to what is REAL. Talk to your ideal candidate, highlight the challenges not the benefits, be bold and cheeky where possible.
These tips just skim the surface of effective hiring.
You must treat your hiring process as you would your operational ones. It must be worked and evolved until you find what works so it can be strengthened and repeated.
