Hiring a talented employee is fast becoming a critical competitive differentiator because employees are the heartbeat of an organization.
The entire recruitment process is more complicated than just reviewing resumes, screening candidates, and conducting interviews.
Many mistakes can deter a qualified candidate from seeking employment with your company.
Interestingly, 20% of candidates have the skills necessary for current and future careers.
With such statistics in mind, hiring top talent is imperative for winning the battle of businesses. Even if you found a perfect candidate, creating a positive hiring experience in your recruitment process and interviewing makes you a preferred employer.
But it’s easier said than done. Why?
Hiring is a time-consuming process, and unless you know specific proven strategies, getting a perfect candidate on board can be difficult.
To make your life easier, we’ve listed some tips for hiring personnel that make a positive impact on your bottom line.
9 Tips to Hiring a Perfect Employee
You can ensure you’re making the right choice every time you have a vacant position by following these nine tips.
1. Craft a Candidate-Focused Job Description
For recruiting the best talent, your first step is crafting a candidate-focused job description. It’s more like marketing your job to candidates who are a perfect fit.
Before you write a job description, understand the type of candidate you want to hire.
Otherwise, you might end up hiring someone who is a bad hire and may require replacement sooner or later.
Interestingly, according to The Wall Street Journal, job descriptions focused on responsibility and requirements can prevent potential candidates from applying.
So, instead of listing out only roles and responsibilities, craft a job description that primarily focuses on what your company can do for candidates.
Pro-tip: Candidates tend to respond more to job descriptions that speak about how a company can help them grow instead of focusing on the company’s expectations from a candidate.
2. Bring a Change to Your Recruitment Process
Rather than having telephonic conversations and grilling a candidate with extensive rounds of technical interviews, focus on something unique to hire talent.
That’s why companies extensively use pre-employment tests and online tests to hire qualified talent that perfectly blends in with their culture.
For organizations hiring for a technical role like java developer, conducting a Java coding test that assesses a candidate’s ability to program a small algorithm in Java is an ideal recruitment process.
Rather than conducting multiple rounds of interviews to assess the Java skills, this test from TestGorilla will help you screen candidates based on their skill set.
This helps improve your hiring process, saves time for both employer and candidate, and allows you to hire the best candidate.
Pro-tip: Specialized and skill-specific tests are a great way to hire candidates with desirable skills.
3. Look For Candidates With the Right Personality for a Vacant Position
Often, hiring managers fall into the trap of recruiting candidates based on their educational qualifications and the specialized skill set necessary for a job.
While candidates can easily acquire hard skills, they cannot change or alter their personality according to your company’s culture.
It’s not possible to acquire the right personality and people skills.
More than hard skills, give importance to hiring candidates who are willing, eager, and passionate to join your company. Such culturally fit employees will increase workplace efficiency.
So, when screening candidates, look from the lens of soft skills and give importance to the work ethics and personality.
Pro-tip: When it comes to hiring culturally fit employees, focus on both technical and soft skills.
4. Run Social Checks
While it pays to know your prospective employee, asking personal questions may make them uncomfortable.
Understanding social behavior and personality goes a long way in understanding their skills and personality. So, instead of asking directly, run social checks on your employees.
Visit their social media profiles to learn more about a candidate. Also, use their LinkedIn profile to develop better insights into their skills, experience and understand how vital their professional network is.
Pro-tip: Social checks can provide both negative and positive about a candidate and help in creating a first impression. Employers can use this information to decide the candidature rather than spending time screening and interviewing candidates.
5. Optimize Your Brand
One of the top ways to attract the best talent pool is by optimizing your employer branding. Getting your company featured in Best Places to Work or similar awards can help you attract qualified professionals.
Just like a website, invest in building and uplifting your employer brand to hire qualified candidates.
Make your social presence felt, create an employer-friendly image, and provide an excellent employment atmosphere to your employees.
Apart from offering lucrative salaries, companies like Google and Facebook are renowned for providing a perfect work-life balance and an employer-friendly work culture.
Building such a culture will take some time, but you will automatically attract the top talent when you successfully create such an image.
Pro-tip: Creating employer branding isn’t a one-day affair. Instead, it may take several years to come out as an employee-friendly brand.
6. Leverage Artificial Intelligence
With the rapid technology penetration, companies widely use artificial intelligence (AI) to make intelligent hiring decisions. Interestingly, companies that use AI for making hiring decisions witness a 35% decrease in employee turnover.
Using AI, companies can better align a candidate with a job role. This ultimately increases the quality of hire and lets you hire the top talent for a vacant position.
Companies are using AI to screen candidates, assess a potential employee’s skills, help with job advertising, and predict future staffing requirements.
When you use it, you develop a smarter recruiting process because it helps you save a significant amount of time.
Pro-tip: AI and recruitment technology are slowly changing the recruiting experience landscape and allowing companies to improve their hiring process.
7. Pay Attention to Questions a Candidate Ask
It’s common for a qualified, skilled, and intelligent candidate to ask meaningful questions during the interview process. Often, questions a candidate asks during the interview demonstrate their presence of mind, preparation, and seriousness for a job role.
This can be a vital sign for an employer to identify potential candidates.
Also, don’t always ask questions to candidates; instead, encourage them to ask questions to gauge a candidate’s skill and preparedness for their interview.
Pro-tip: Paying attention to questions an employee asks reflects their sincerity concerning the job.
8. Post Job at the Right Place
Crafting and writing a job description is one thing, and posting it on the right platform is another.
You need to post the right job offers at the right place to hire suitable candidates.
While some jobs may perform better on job boards like Indeed or Monster, others may perform exceedingly well on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
You can even post on niche board sites, university career boards, referrals from current employees, and social media websites.
If you’re planning to hire entry-level professionals, posting jobs on university career boards and job sites may make more sense than others. While the list is endless, make sure you pick the right one to hire talent that can take your company to the next level.
Pro-tip: Focus on posting your job on various job boards, sites, and social media to hire top talent.
9. Take Candidate Outside the Workplace
In-person job interviews usually take place in an office, either in-office or conference room.
Focus on understanding your candidates by taking them to a new setting. For example, if you want to assess a candidate’s interest in your company and how well they interact with your team, take them on your office tour.
This tour allows candidates to ask questions regarding what they see—someone who doesn’t show much interest in asking questions, may not be your ideal candidate.
You can even take candidates outside your office setting like restaurants and other places for more casual interaction. However, this technique may not be a viable option for every organization.
It can help you showcase candidates’ personalities and whether they fit in your team.
Pro-tip: Different interview settings can help you discover a candidate’s ability to connect with you and carry on a conversation.
Wrapping Up
Why do organizations have a tough time finding suitable candidates and filling certain roles?
Most organizations focus on mass recruitment to save their hiring cost.
Keep in mind that improving the quality of hire isn’t going to happen overnight. But the long-term benefits you reap from it are countless.
A brand must create a strategic recruitment process that connects you with capable, qualified, and culturally fit candidates.
Despite the challenges you face, your hiring process can become helpful if you follow these nine tips. These tips will land you the best candidate for a job that will give the best to your company.
How are you hiring your next employee? Which of these tips are you using?
Please share your thoughts with us!
Author’s Bio
Priya Jain is a professional copywriter with 8 years of experience. She has an MBA and engineering degree. When she is not writing, you will find her teaching math, spending her day running behind her toddler, and trying new recipes. You can follow her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
Email: priyajain1934@gmail.com
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