A January 2022 Forbes article“CEOs’ Most Important Business Challenges In 2022” points out that one of a CEO’s biggest challenges is attracting and retaining talent. We doubt it would surprise most readers. Hiring problems are widespread and we all have our own horror stories of hiring gone wrong.
What might surprise you, however, is that hiring problems are preventable. Business owners, leaders, and managers are often unaware that they can make the entire hiring process more effective by taking just 5 steps.
We want to share with you five steps in the hiring process that, if consistently implemented, will allow you to prevent hiring mistakes and increase hiring success.
5 Steps in the Hiring Process that will Consistently Increase your Hiring Success
1. Use a Scorecard to Keep You Focused on What Top Performing Success Looks Like in the Role
Scorecards and benchmarks help identify the key strengths, competencies, and behavioural style needed to be a top performer in a specific role. They should be used as a standard way to measure every candidate.
To create a successful scorecard, you need clarity and alignment on exactly what defines a top performer in the role you are hiring for. You need everyone that is part of the hiring process to have crystal clarity and agreement on what success in the role would look like.
The scorecard should include clarity on what the purpose of the role is and the exact outcomes that will have to be delivered by the person in the role. It should also contain a list of the non-negotiable skills and competencies that will secure success in the role.
2. Standardise Pre-Screening to Increase the Flow of High Quality Candidates
There are some great candidates who have terrible CVs and some terrible candidates who have great CVs. We often see that the information on the CV is not representative of the candidate and what they can do in the context of what is required for success in the role.
When only the candidate’s CV is used to pre-screen, only candidates that look good on paper are screened in.
Add to this the reality of bias. We all come with our own inherent set of biases, and hiring teams can inadvertently let small, non-obvious things affect their decision-making. By the time they have narrowed the applicants down to a shortlist, chances are micro-biases have crept in. Your shortlist may not represent top performers that are most likely to thrive in the job.
A top of funnel application process that includes effective questions formulated to test for specific skills can significantly reduce bias whilst increasing the quality of candidates. Tools that focus on clever ways of parsing CVs and keywords are less effective as they rely purely on the CV. This is where Mint Kulca’s Applicant Tracking Software can come into play and help you create a pre-screening process that will allow you to hire the perfect candidate every time.
3. Don’t Underestimate the Importance of the Telephonic Screening Call
The goal of the telephonic screening call is to eliminate candidates who are wrong for the role as quickly as possible. Without rigorous screening at this point of the process, you might end up wasting time on additional interviews for candidates that should never have been invited in the first place.
Your telephonic screening call should be structured, asking the same set of questions to all candidates. You should have the scorecard next to you to match the candidate’s strengths to what is required for success in the role. It’s best only to invite qualified candidates who are a strong match to your scorecard for interviews.
If you succeed at this step in the process, you will have already cleared out the average and poor performers from your pipeline of candidates before spending more time with them in the face-to-face interviews.
4. A Structured Interview Process Increases Your Ability to Select the Right Candidate
If you truly want to increase your ability to consistently hire top performers, everyone who forms part of the process and current team needs to follow the same orderly, structured interview approach. A candidate’s past performance is the most accurate predictor of what their future performance will look like.
Therefore, the questions you ask should be aimed at collecting facts and data about the candidate’s past performance or track record over their entire career. You want to have a clear understanding of the candidate’s current strengths and weaknesses so that you can match it to your scorecard. A good match to the scorecard will ensure that you hire people capable of delivering success in the role.
5. Never, Ever Skip the References in Your Selection Process
References are an incredibly important factor in the hiring process for one main reason; they validate or disprove what the candidate has put on their CV and told you during the interview.
To get the best results with references, you should follow a structured process, and ask the same set of questions. You need to make sure that you avoid imposters.
Sometimes candidates have a friend or co-worker that pose as a previous boss. Try to call the referee at the business number and not on a personal phone number and confirm their role within the company.
Most importantly, don’t just listen to what the referee is saying. Listen to how they are saying it. During an employment reference check, the tone the referee uses is important. Pauses, hesitation, and lack of enthusiasm might tell you that there’s more that the referee isn’t telling you.
Hot Tip: Get acess to our library of Hiring Strategy webinars and ebooks.
You Can’t Build a Great Company if You Can’t Consistently Hire Top Performers
Without a steady team of top performers, it’s virtually impossible to establish a culture that embraces performance and motivation. A strong work ethic supported by top performers is contagious. It can even uplift the average performers that made it past the interview stage!
Want to increase your business success and improve your hiring process? Try Mint Kulca’s future-forward applicant tracking software today (it’s free to sign up). Our software helps you hire Top Performers 90% of the time!
