Effective screening and interviewing makes all the difference.
Last time, we talked about how, even for small businesses, doing your own recruiting can be a false economy in terms of hard costs, especially when it comes to sourcing top candidates.
But once you’ve got 25 resumes from potential hires in front of you, how do you choose the ones who are most likely to be a success in your organization?
Screening and interviewing are 2 of the most important steps in selecting the right person to hire, but they’re often discounted by small businesses. Small business owners often think: ”I know my business better than anyone else, and I wouldn’t have been this successful already if I didn’t understand people.”
It’s true that most successful entrepreneurs are good at reading people, and building successful relationships with customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. But assessing whether a person will be a great employee requires a different skillset, and asking questions designed to elicit specific responses which will predict on-the-job behaviour.
Professional recruiters – whose reputations hinge on being able to assess the right candidates for a job – can make a big difference by screening out the B- and C-listers, and ensuring you only see the potential A-listers for a job.
But if you aren’t using a recruiter, or it’s up to you to select the final hire from the top 3 a recruiter is sending you, here’s how you can improve your chances of getting a top performer:
- Make a list of the traits of your current top performers. Are they high-energy, entrepreneurial types, or more methodical, detail-oriented workers?
- Envision the ‘ideal candidate’ for the role, including education, experience, work/management style, skillsets and personality. Write it down!
- Make a list of the day-to-day skillsets required for the position. Remember that whether someone has an MBA may ultimately be less important than whether they are comfortable preparing and delivering presentations to senior management
- Learn more about Behavioural Based Interviewing. BBI is all about asking interview questions which are designed to get the candidate to provide specific examples of what they’ve done in work situations in the past, and are better predictors of future success than general questions like “So, tell me about yourself…”
- Prepare a list of interview questions before you enter the interview room. It’s easy for small business owners to allow interviews to veer off into ‘social interactions’ rather than conversations designed to elicit specific information
PART 3: Finding great candidates