Recruiting is one of the major areas of business that can drastically affect the quality and profit of a business. Making bad choices in this arena of management spells disaster. Turnover is expensive so it’s important to make the right hires as often as possible. Hiring the wrong people can also lead to poor work performance, increased incidence of injury in the workplace, and can open you up to other liabilities.
These are all reasons why recruiting new staff needs to be taken seriously. The results of your hiring decisions will last for years, or even for the full lifetime of your business. Fortunately, there are many ways to improve the chances of hiring the right people for your business. Here are several tips to consider when hiring new employees.
Clearly Define The Organization’s Needs
The first thing that needs to be done is to define the needs of the workplace. You can’t hire the right people if you don’t even know the real needs of the worksite. Degrees and certificates aside, this means carefully thinking about the duties related to the positions that need to be filled.
Of course, education and job experience are really important based on the open position. The list of various school and work backgrounds are too extensive to go into here. But work is more than the application of skill. People are not robots and some difficult positions are better filled by people with certain character traits. Carefully choosing someone that can thrive with the social and practical aspects of the position means finding the right fit.
Make Sure They Are The Real Deal
Let’s face it, most people lie to some extent on their resumes. Some exaggeration or vague information is to be expected. But when is it too much? The answer to that question depends on the position’s responsibilities, social, or environmental impact. Ask any HR manager about the horror that results from not properly vetting employees. But what can be done to mitigate this issue?
There are a few things that employers can do to minimize the chance of hiring someone dangerously unqualified. First, you can run a background check. Ordering an Enhanced Check is the fastest and most convenient way to get the bulk of the information. Background checks are going to grant access to the most alarming information.
If you are also concerned with their professional claims, you need to spend a little bit more time and effort. Depending on whether you’re validating degrees, certifications, or work experience there are different routes that need to be taken.
A call or email to their university should yield results very quickly and conveniently, provided that the campus is open.
Board certifications for medical practitioners and lawyers can be verified on the certifying agency’s website. Lesser certificates can be harder to validate depending on the size of the issuing body. But you can usually get a response via email after a few days.
And finally, while work experience is often the most important consideration when recruiting. Checking references is also the hardest to verify. An employee can write just about anything down in their reference field and you’ll have no idea whether it’s real or whether it’s their cousin playing CFO from the sofa. Numbers often change and many people screen anyone they don’t know.
In these instances, digital correspondence is a preferred method. Send them an email or chat message and you’re more likely to get a response. This also helps to validate that they are a real person and not a bluff.
Be Transparent From The Start
A big part of recruiting and management is employee morale. The biggest mistake employers make is not paying enough attention to morale issues that pop up in the work environment. A happy workforce is much more productive than a resentful one. Most employers start off on the wrong foot with their workers from day one. And they do that by lying or misleading their employees.
Many new hires feel on top of the world when they hear about their new job only to be disillusioned when the reality of the workplace is made clear to them. People don’t like being misled. They might not show it, but they’ll always be distrustful and resentful if they feel they’ve been duped.
Make sure to shoot straight with them during the interview and orientation process. That means being upfront about salary and work expectations while keeping the corporate family guilt trips to a minimum.
In other words, make sure you’re treating your employees fairly and talking to them like adults when things turn bad regardless of the cause.
