It’s an irony of our times that as technology becomes more powerful and widespread, hiring the right people becomes ever more critical. How do you know they have the skills and experience stated on their resume? This irony doesn’t apply to just technical roles, either. Human abilities such as curiosity, intuition, collaboration, work ethic, and conflict resolution help individuals and organizations survive and thrive during the technological evolution. Hiring will be a strategic advantage in 2020. Here are six best practices to help you succeed.
1. Treat hiring like you would any business-to-business transaction.
This might sound strange, but hiring is a business-to-business transaction. Sure, it’s a business decision for your organization. But, it’s also a business decision for the prospective employee. They are trying to grow revenues in their personal business model.
If hiring is a B2B transaction, treat it like one. In part, this means improving the quality of your applicants and reducing the quantity.
This is the reverse of what many employers do today. Many organizations treat hiring like retail sales. They fill up their applicant tracking system with as many leads as possible. Then, they struggle to sort out all those leads during screening and interviewing.
“Only about a third of U.S. companies report that they monitor whether their hiring practices lead to good employees; few of them do so carefully, and only a minority even track cost per hire and time to hire. Imagine if the CEO asked how an advertising campaign had gone, and the response was “We have a good idea how long it took to roll out and what it cost, but we haven’t looked to see whether we’re selling more.” – Harvard Business Review
2. Hire and promote from inside the company.
In keeping with the B2B analogy, any business will tell you that it’s cheaper to keep a current customer than it is to acquire a new one. So, the same applies for your employees. It’s cheaper to promote and reassign your proven and dependable existing employees than to find new ones.
Hiring and promoting from within requires you to have a strong employee retention rate. If your workforce turns over quickly, you don’t have time to promote from within. One of the best ways to retain employees is to build a trusted workforce. People stick around where they can trust and be trusted. This is the reverse of what many employers do today, which is to spend money hiring external recruiters to find passive, external candidates to fill roles. In the process, they pass over their current, loyal employees.
3. Increase diversity in selection committee and interviewers.
If you want a diverse workforce–and you should–then you need more than just a diverse pool of applicants. It’s bad for diversity to have a committee of the same sex, age, and culture evaluating candidates for a position. The same goes for other types of diversity as well: experience, job level, tenure in the organization.
Instead, create diversity in your selection committee and interviewers. This removes bias in the hiring process, which helps increase diversity.
4. Use standard interview questions.
Interviewing is a crucial skill for the long-term health of an organization, and yet precious few organizations treat it as such. Having people just asking questions off the top of their mind results in useless interviews.
Instead, have standard questions that each interviewer would ask depending on their role and interaction with the candidate going forward. To get the full picture of the candidate, it is important that each interviewer focuses on a different theme for their questions. For example, a technical interviewer may focus on problem-solving and the HR director may ask questions to determine cultural fit. That way, it’s easier and more effective to compare candidates. Also, consider having questions that you ask all candidates so that you can compare candidates over time.
5. Make candidate experience as important as the customer experience.
Who takes care of your customer? Your employees. Take better care of your employees, they’ll take better care of your customers, and your business will thrive. (This is known as the Service-Profit Chain. Sir Richard Branson swears by it.)
Feeling cared for as an employee starts with a candidate’s experience while applying, interviewing, and accepting their position. It continues with their onboarding experience, too.
6. Build a trusted workforce from the start, quickly and without bias.
HR researchers and consultants, Great Place to Work, has found that workplaces with trust have three times the financial success compared to those that don’t. One way that you can build trust is through a standard, unbiased vetting process. ACGR provides easy, unbiased vetting of candidates using the power of voice. A ten-minute phone interview is all that’s needed to identify the vast majority of candidates who are trustworthy.