Must-Knows When Recruiting

Most companies looking to recruit new staff will bring them in from outside the company. Six months ago your new employee arrived and was working out perfectly… fast forward to today, things aren’t performing as well as you hoped and indeed the candidate that was once the shining star has “crashed and burned”. Statistics show that this is true up to 50% of the time, so what goes wrong?

At New Staff we work with our clients in situations like this and find that there are three main questions to address before you get to the advertising or the interviews.

1) Achievements and goals
The best way to determine what needs to be done is to ask. Ask the current employees, departments, managers, everyone that the position affects. The question to ask here is “What needs to be achieved in this position for the employee the department and ultimately the company to be successful?”

2) Skills and behaviours
Next question to ask is “What are the skills and behaviours the new employee must have?” and “What would we like them to have?” Make a list of the “musts”, these points are non-negotiable; and “wants” – the nice to haves. As a bare minimum your successful candidate needs to meet all “musts”.

3) Interview process
Needs to be thorough and example based. “Tell me about a time when you…” or “What was your greatest challenge at XYZ” are excellent questions to get the candidate to provide real answers. Interviews always need to be followed up with reference checks. Without a detailed interview process there is a possibility of potentially mis-matching the candidate’s skills and attributes to the role and the business, which can work out to be quite a costly exercise!

Increasing the chance of success for both the business and the new employee involves being up front from the beginning about the role and responsibilities. Hiring external candidates doesn’t have to be risky; all you need is a thorough recruitment process. Growth to your business all starts with recruiting and integrating the right talent.