3 Basic Steps to Hiring Success
Three Basic Steps to Hiring Success
- Employment prospects are improving and hiring activity is increasing in almost all jurisdictions. The pace is faster in Canada, Australia and New Zealand but all of the G7 countries are trending in this direction. If you are not hiring right now you will probably need to do so within the next few months.
- As employment and hiring activity pick up, competition for the best candidates will increase which in turn will drive a need to reduce the time to hire. This is already the case for those seeking IT and Software Development personnel.
- Businesses are still licking their wounds and rebuilding balance sheets from the 2009 recession so they need to do everything more quickly, more simply and at a lower cost, while still being effective – a very tall order to fill.
- In comparison to 20 or even 10 years ago businesses are employing fewer people while expecting them to assume greater responsibility and to be more productive than their predecessors. To accomplish this end businesses have to continuously seek to improve the quality of their hires.
How can you clear all of these hurdles? The following three initiatives will make your business more competitive and effective in finding top performers for your positions:
- Know What You Are Looking For: You can’t possibly hire the best if you haven’t defined what characteristics differentiate top performers from the rest of the persons you employ in any position. Job analysis will enable you to identify the key characteristics for job success to provide better job descriptions, job ads and behavioral interview questions.
- Move to Online Recruiting: Start with a career web site for a central source of job posting and candidate information. Couple your career web site with an online Applicant Processing System (“APS”) that enables applicants to apply for jobs posted on your career web site and enables you to identify the best candidates. These two steps will reduce your time and/or increase your quality of hire – guaranteed. Your APS will enable you to collect resumes and required applicant information, administer screening questions, administer your Prevue Assessments and receive all of this information instantaneously. In a tight labor market you can respond immediately to the best prospects. If there are too many applicants for your job openings your APS can automatically filter out the best candidates with screening questions and Prevue job fit scores. You focus your attention on selecting the best instead of sifting through a pile of resumes.
- Source Smarter: You have to fill your recruiting funnel with good prospects if you want to make good hires. Give some thought to where the best applicants for your types of job postings will likely seek employment and make sure you are positioned to get in front of those applicants. This could be a paid job board like Monster or an industry specific job board. Expand your search to social networks and the hundreds of free job boards that should be accessible through your APS. You should be able to automate the posting process through your APS to source the most qualified candidates faster. Also consider going beyond the job boards to sourcing passive job seekers who are not actively seeking a position through postings on major social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
If you think these three steps sound too time consuming or expensive, you are wrong. We can show you how to implement all of these steps efficiently and economically.
Written by: Ken Danderfer