The performance of the employees determines the success of your business. It is, therefore, recommendable to practice the best staffing strategies while hiring. This post will discuss some of the best tips that will help you avoid a bad hire.
While the hiring process is challenging and time-consuming, companies tend to hire staffing agencies to ensure better and timely staffing. Although hiring a staffing company is expensive, especially for small businesses, it is worth it. In actuality, these agencies’ hiring cost is meager when compared to the loss your company can incur from a bad hire. Recent research shows that a company can lose 30 percent of its annual income due to wrong hiring. To prevent such losses in the future, I recommend reading on through the article.
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Five Crucial Tips for Avoiding Bad Hire
A growing business demands urgent staffing. Also, some positions are critical and require the employer to hire the soonest possible. However, rushed hire will often result in a lousy hire. There various ways of avoiding bad hire. Here are the most crucial tips
1. Align the Description to the Role
When you have an open position in your company, the first thing is to advertise the job. On advertising, both the qualified and unqualified candidates will apply for that position, giving you some more hard work to evaluate them. To avoid this, you should take your time to assess the gap you need to fill and creating an adequate description of the job to the position you are filling before advertising.
What will be the employee’s responsibilities?
What are the skills set you should look for from your candidates?
What area of expertise and experience should the candidate have?
Answering these questions will enable you to craft a realistic, detailed job description. The description will let the applicants asses themselves and know if they are a perfect match to that position as they will know what your company expects from them in advance. In addition to that, the job description will attract only highly qualified candidates. Therefore, you will save time and hassle trying to figure out the best suit in the hiring process.
2. Take Time to Evaluate the Potential Candidates
After advertising a job position, you will probably receive hundreds of applications. A survey shows that an average job position gets an average of 250 applications. With this significant number of applicants, you can easily hire an inappropriate employee if you do not conduct thorough research about the prospects.
Before calling the applicants for the interview, you should take time to interrogate the applicant’s CV, and conduct background checks, experience and expertise, goals, and interest. According to the director of Commerce for Specialist Markets at Robert Walters UK, Richard Boyd, a CV should help the employer learn more about the applicant. Errors are red flags that you should consider. The CV also enables you to evaluate the applicant’s resilience, which is also a significant consideration.
Conducting background checks to determine the applicant’s suitability is also a crucial thing to do. The research enables you to limit the vast pool of applicants. It is, however, essential to note that past performance does not guarantee perfect hire.
Interest and goals are also crucial factors that can significantly influence the employees’ performance. While advertising the position, you can ask the applicant to include their social media accounts on their cover letters. Social accounts are better sources of information about potential employees. You can find out what your prospect is interested in, their goals, how they relate with each other, among other details that can influence your company’s performance, from social media. Candidates with the same interest as your other employees, and who can relate well are ideal prospects.
3. Interview Multiple Candidates
There is no fixed number of candidates you should interview. It is, therefore, advisable to assess as many prospects as possible. While cross-examining, it is vital to give the candidate ample time to express himself freely. Ensure not to pepper the candidate with tough questions, as this will provide you with a better sense of the candidate.
Also, it is best to interview with other members of your company. Having a team of interviewers will enable you to compare notes and make an efficient decision. However, ensure to have friendly team members.
In addition to that, after selecting the ideal candidates, you should prepare better interview questions and strategies. Avoid common interview questions, such as asking the candidates their strengths and weaknesses. It is also advisable to have a pre-interview or after-interview meeting with your prospects. The sessions will help you pick up the missed point about the candidate during the interview process.
4. Provide a Paid Pre-Hire Project
The best way to evaluate the performance of the prospect is by giving him a paid test. You do not want to hire someone who has different interests and goals from the company’s goals. Therefore, offering a paid trial to the new hire will give you a better taste of the candidate. You will have a better understanding of how he relates to co-workers and his actual performance.
Conclusion
Company staffing, especially the creative staffing or filling a talent gap, is a critical action. It requires a realistic timeline, hard-work, and determination. It is advisable to hire staffing agencies if you are in a tight deadline to staff fill a talent gap to avoid a bad hire.
