Hiring

Everybody wants to hire superior people, don’t they? Then why do so many hiring decisions yield employees who are just average performers at best, and disastrous at worst?

"Having" vs. "Doing"

In the case of these less-than-stellar outcomes, perhaps there’s an underlying cause. Too many hiring managers create job descriptions that are really laundry lists of candidate "requirements." When these lists drive the interview process, hiring results suffer. The selection process becomes focused on what candidates must "have" to get the job, instead of what candidates must "do" once they’re on the job. It’s difficult to hire superior performers in these scenarios because there’s no definition of what superior performance actually is.

Get S.M.A.R.T.

Once your job description is defined in terms of the tasks you want the employee to do, you’ll need to take each task and turn it into a S.M.A.R.T. objective.

S.M.A.R.T. objectives are:

Specific
Measurable
Action-oriented
Results-focused
Time-based

“Recruiting is the single most important part of the POWER hiring process. It's not something you do at the end of an interview--it starts the moment you begin the interviewing process.”

“Recruiting is more marketing than selling. If you oversell, over-talk, and under-listen you'll either lose the best candidates or pay too much”

The Top Ten Tips for Effective Recruiting

1. Create a compelling vision of the job.
2. Don't talk about money before the interview.
3. Don't talk for 15 minutes about the great merits of the job.
4. Discuss the great merits of the job in one-minute sound bites before each question.
5. Create an opportunity gap.
6. Test a candidate's interest throughout the process by asking challenging questions.
7. Remember: The more interviews you have, the more vested interests the candidate has in accepting an offer.
8. Test all offers before making them formal.
9. Always listen. Letting the candidate talk and respond to fact-finding questions clearly demonstrates your interest in their candidacy.
10. Stay in touch. You should follow up with the candidate every few days after an offer is accepted.

We all know that the circumstances involved with recruiting are not perfect. We never have enough money; the best candidates have multiple opportunities elsewhere; you're always vulnerable to counter-offers. But following our tips can at least help to level the playing field--and make us all better recruiters.