Hiring and Retaining Employees: How to Hire the Right Person
To ensure your business truly succeeds, you must surround yourself with the right team, and often that means understanding how to hire the right person. Knowing the best approach to hiring means you’ll be able to get to the core of exactly who a candidate is and how he or she might be able to function within your team. The best approach is so much more than looking at a resume or calling a reference. Instead, hiring and retaining employees is an intense process. Fortunately, by putting the right steps into place now, you’ll be able to build a system that ensures you always select the right hire.
Hiring and Retaining Employees Starts with Benchmarking
Do you know exactly what you need? Taking the time to decide what you want an employee to do means it’s easier to select the right person. Reflect on what responsibilities a new hire might have as well as the level of skills and experience you would want in someone you hire. Don’t just think in terms of hard skills here. Often you can train an individual when it comes to some hard skills. Soft skills and experience may count for more than anything. In addition to the job itself, though, you’ll want to think about your company. If you haven’t ever taken time to define your values and the ideal mindset your employees should have, there’s never been a better opportunity. The ability to fit in with your company’s culture is key to hiring the right individual, so ensure you know what you want before you ever post an ad for a job.
Decide How to Evaluate Each Candidate
Once you know what you want, it’s time to understand how you’ll know the right person for the job when they walk through the door. When it comes to hiring, the interview is the traditional way to evaluate a candidate, and while that can be a nice piece of the puzzle, it’s not a good idea for that to be the only piece of the puzzle. You’ll want to consider a number of evaluation strategies to ensure you’ve found a good fit. Consider adding questionnaires, skill lists, or even personality tests to the process. You may also want to develop a rubric that helps you look at all of the data on any given candidate.
Structure the Interview Carefully
An interview is likely to be part of that process you develop, as well it should be. Be sure, though, that you structure the interview in a way that will give you a clear sense of who the candidate truly is. Be creative during the interview. Nearly every candidate will be ready for the typical slate of interview questions, so do some exploration of what you truly want to better understand how that candidate will fit. Be challenging, too. Put the candidate, mentally, in situations where you can get a sense of how they might actually be able to help within your company. Don’t include useless brainteaser questions here like “How many basketballs could you fit in a vehicle if . . .” The goal is to better understand how they think and how they fit within your organization. Ask questions that help reveal what they look for in others, what others see in them as candidates, and even what their natural skills are. You could also take them out of the interview conference room to better understand who they are. Take them on a tour of your company, introducing them to people along the way. You’ll get a better sense of how curious they are and whether they treat others with respect. Taking a candidate out for lunch or dinner will often provide you with some of the same insights. Look carefully to understand whether they’re easily irritated or even if they can keep a conversation going with smart, insightful questions. Don’t forget to include others as part of the interview process. You don’t run your company alone. The candidate needs to be a natural fit for your organization, so why not include some of the key players in the process?
When Hiring and Retaining Employees Don’t Forget About References
References are still going to be a good source of information about the candidate you’re considering. Do some independent research to learn more about what this person does well and what kind of culture might work best for them. Find out more about whether they often required supervision and how they got along with their coworkers and fit into the company culture. Don’t forget to ask about how they handle work-related stress.
Create a Better Onboarding Process
Once you’ve chosen the right candidate, you’re far from done. The key to hiring and retaining employees is to make sure your onboarding process means more than showing your new hire to his or her desk. Instead, it should be a foundational journey that helps prepare your new hire to be your top-performing employee. Build a process that allows your new employee to develop better connections with those around them. Don’t forget to be direct as you show them how they can best contribute to your organization. Finally, make sure the process is intuitive, easy, and well organized. Offer clear expectations for training and orientation at a pace that helps them feel prepared to join your company.
Hiring and retaining employees are some of the toughest tasks facing companies today, but creating a better process from the outset can help you ensure you make the right hire the first time. If you are looking for more help growing your company in a sustainable way, then reach out to us today! We’re happy to help you along your journey.
