How Can You Improve the Quality of Your Hires?

When it comes to the success of your organization, nothing is more important than talent. A business lives and dies by the quality of its hires. If you’re struggling to hire the caliber of candidate you’d like to have in your organization, you’re facing a serious problem.

So, what can you do to bring in the quality candidates you want and deserve? It all comes down to your hiring process. A good hiring process generates a healthy flow of talent into and out of your organization, allowing it to thrive over the long time. A bad hiring process is a problem that only leads to worse problems in the long term. Good hires can save a company, while bad hires can drive it into the ground.

Let’s say your recent hires haven’t been as good as you’d like for them to be. What can you do to change this trend before it becomes a potentially lethal problem for your organization? Let’s go over the parts of the hiring process you can change right now if you want to have better hiring success in the future. Making great hires is a crucial challenge, and it starts by getting your job description right.

1.     Define the Position in Detail

One of the hardest parts of the hiring process is actually defining the position. You might think you already know what the position you’re hiring for looks like. You might think it’s a simple thing to define it and set the requirements in detail.

Well, it is simple. But it’s also crucial to getting the right hire. In our technological times, the requirements of a position can rapidly change between one hire and the next. New duties and responsibilities might be needed, old ones might be phased out, and the scope of the position can change massively.

The point here is that if you’re working with last year’s job description, you’re not going to get the best candidate for this year. Take some time to understand the position as it exists right now, and you’ll be on track to making the right hire when it comes time to decide.

2.     Understand the Hard and Soft Skills You Need from a Candidate

The key word here is “need.” Plenty of organizations get so caught up in looking for the perfect candidate that they fail to recognize a good candidate when they see them. And by the time they decide to hire the good candidate, they’ve been picked up by another company.

Then you end up having to hire a sub-par candidate just to fill the position.

That’s why it’s important to have a realistic idea of what skills and core competencies you can expect from the right candidate for the job. That means hard skills. That means soft skills. That means values, cultural fit, and personality types.

In other words, you want to have the minimum requirements set up so you can quickly recognize the right candidate and get them the job offer quickly. Set realistic expectations for what you want from a hire, and you’ll increase the quality of the hires you actually make.

3.     Come Up with the Right Interview Questions

The whole point of an interview is to help you figure out whether or not the person you’re interviewing has the skills and cultural fit to fill the position in question. If you’re going to do that with any degree of success, you need to be prepared to ask the right questions.

Take some time to come up with a set of questions for each of the skills and core competencies your new hire needs to have. This gives you a chance to have an objective hiring process that won’t just end up with the most charming candidate getting the job.

Prepare behavioral and performance-based questions to learn more about how your candidates have performed in the past. The best indication of a candidate’s future performance is their past performance. Be prepared to dig deep to find out whether or not the candidate really fits the requirements you’ve set.

4.     Be as Objective as Possible in Your Hiring Process

When the time comes to conduct interviews, hiring teams often make a very understandable mistake: they hire the candidate they like the most.

Sometimes the most likeable candidate is the best person for the job. Sometimes, though, the most likeable candidate is just charming enough to get themselves hired. That’s why it’s important to be objective in the hiring process.

How do you do that? Have each of your interviewers rate each candidate’s fitness for each of the skills and core competencies the right hire needs to have. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Just have your interviewers rate each skill on a scale from 1 to 5, or 1 to 10.

Then when you add these ratings up, you have a pretty objective measure of how competent the candidate is in each of the areas you need. This gives you a solid basis for moving on to make the final hiring decision.

5.     Talk to a Hiring Expert

Sometimes you can solve your hiring problems by making a few changes yourself and getting your process on a new footing. On the other hand, sometimes you need to bring in an expert who specializes in bringing in the right candidate every time.

If your hiring process isn’t bringing in the high-quality candidates your organization needs, consider talking to a recruiter. Recruiters work on the hiring process every day, so they know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to finding the right candidate. Whether you’re looking for a few hires right now or a partner to help you with your hiring process over the long term, the right recruiter can be a massive benefit to you.

Good talent is the most important factor in your organization’s success. If you don’t think you can get your hiring process up to speed, maybe it’s time to talk to a recruiter you can trust.