Finding the Right People for Your Business
The jobs market is remarkably healthy at the present moment, despite growing financial crisis and disruption in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. It is more important than ever that, as a business, your hiring processes are robust and discerning; it is a jobseeker’s market, after all, and hiring the wrong candidate can have costly consequences.
The Costs of Hiring the ‘Wrong’ People
Hiring the ‘wrong’ candidate, whether they are inexperienced or ill-suited to your company’s internal culture, can represent a number of costs to your business in both the short and long term.
There are significant financial costs incurred by the quick staff turnover that can result from poor candidates; hiring alone can cost money, and the more you have to do it the more your long-term profits are harmed. There is also the cost of training to consider, and passive costs relating to downtime and work backlogs caused by vacancy or poor quality of work.
Casting the Right Net
The first pitfall for many business’ hiring processes is the net they cast for candidates. A poor selection process can lead to poor candidates, and an inefficient interviewing process. For example, filling a leadership role is of particular importance to your business, and a process that should not be unnecessarily prolonged due to poor selections of candidates. Here, executive search services can be useful, in allowing you to delegate candidate outreach to an experienced third-party team – thus garnering you a rich crop of candidates from which to choose.
Another important aspect to your initial search is the elimination of unconscious bias. Even as a forward-thinking organisation with progressive leaders and business approaches, the hiring process can be marred by unintended, unchecked and unconscious discrimination.
The methods for tackling unconscious bias in employment are many and varied, but can help you hire from a wider range of backgrounds and experiences. This can enable you to build a healthy, skilled and diverse team that will stand your business in better stead for the future.
The Interview Process
Of course, while fielding the right candidates initially can drastically improve your hiring prospects overall, it is still the interview process that ultimately helps you pick the perfect one. Some candidates that appear well-suited on paper may not be a right fit for the office’s culture, while other candidates with comparatively slim CVs could wow you with their preparedness.
Coaching this information out of your candidates requires a comprehensive approach to interviewing, with targeted questions that enable you to discover what you need to discover. Your questions should be targeted and wide-ranging, enabling you to learn more about your candidate on multiple levels; the interview should not simply be an opportunity to hear a candidate’s CV spoken back to you.
The interview process goes both ways, of course. It is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your expectations for the role, and to speak more about your company’s internal culture and wider aspirations. By being transparent here, you lower the risk of losing skilled candidates to other openings elsewhere.
