Each employee you hire will cost your business about $4,000.
While hiring is unavoidable every once in a while, bad hiring decisions account for as much as 80% of employee turnover.
If anything, these costs highlight the need to take a second look at your hiring systems and how you can tighten your processes to ensure you end up with productive and longtime hires.
Which are some of the things employers that succeed in doing this do? Here are some pointers.
1. Know What you Want
This includes assessing the job and creating a clear and detailed job description.
Similarly, evaluate your organizational culture to form a mental picture of the kind of candidate that would thrive within your corporate culture. Think about the soft skills required too.
What this does, is that it helps you cover all your bases and helps you find someone that will not only be productive but someone that will love working with you.
Employees that love most aspects of their job and work environment tend to be more productive, work harder, and stay with an employer longer.
2. Ditch the Traditional Screening Methods
The resumes you get during recruitment are important, but they are not everything. In fact, resumes and one-on-one interviews might not be as instrumental as they were once thought to be.
Professional resume writing services, for one, mean that the candidate might not have crafted the document you are holding in hand.
The internet has also helped candidates practice the questions you probably plan on asking during the oral interviews. This means that you might get generic, perfect choreographed answers.
To identify good fits, go the untraditional way. Host candidates outside the office, ask open-ended questions, administer pre-assessment tests, and so on.
3. Measure Skill
Evaluating skills means you pay more attention to what a potential employee can do, as opposed to what their academic background suggests they can do.
You can do this by paying attention to the specific roles listed on their role for previous jobs. For fresh graduates, look at the skills they have picked up from volunteering their time, part-time jobs, and year ten placements.
You can also create a workplace scenario for candidates to solve as part of their interviewing process.
While you can train new hires, some situations call for a candidate that can hit the ground running.
4. Hire the Right Attitude
The mantra 'hire for attitude and train for skill' is simple, but carries a lot of weight when making hiring decisions.
Again, you are looking to know who a candidate is off their resume. You can find out more about a person from their social media activity, allowing them to shadow employees and even by evaluating their soft skills.
Employees with a great attitude are also happy to go the extra mile to get things done, even outside their function. This makes attitude a primary deciding factor, especially when hiring for a start-up or an SME.
5. Have the Right Hiring Team in Place
Group synergy cannot be understated and comes in handy in matters of recruitment.
Having the right recruitment team in place helps give a complete picture of who the best candidate is.
Ideally, this team ought to have HR as well as a direct supervisor. While HR might focus more on the general suitability of a candidate, an immediate supervisor is more knowledgeable on the day to day operations.
This means they are able to ask better questions and make impactful judgments regarding a candidate's suitability.
Get Better With Each Hire
Needless to say, you will, at times, hire the best candidates in the market, and still experience premature exits.
This is not always an indication that you hired the wrong person, more so when such cases are few and far between.
The only thing you can do is work harder to perfect your hiring decisions. In time, you will have a working system that will serve you well for years to come.
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