Recruiting good employees for your organization is critical, and your job as the leader is to bring in the best and most qualified. Though this can be tough you can accomplish it. Talent is more than just having a great resume, look for driven individuals. Search for emotionally engaged employees – those with a passion in their eyes or a fire in their belly. Searching for talent is one of the most important and overlooked task for a business owner.
In the book, Hire Tough, Manage Easy, Mel Kleinman spells out the worst practices in recruiting employees that you should avoid.
Great Hiring – Avoid These 10 Bad Habits:
1. Managers don’t recognize the importance of hiring the right employee, so they don’t invest the time needed in order to do so.
2. Managers don’t know what a great employee looks like in terms of capacities, attitude, personality and skills.
3. Managers don’t have a recruiting strategy.
4. Companies don’t make it easy for the right kinds of people to get into the hiring system.
5. Interviewers make the 14-second mistake. Regardless of an interviewer’s skills, most make up their minds about a candidate within the first 14 seconds of the interview.
6. The selection process lacks a plan or structure.
7. Interviewers don’t get great answers, because they don’t ask great questions.
8. Managers don’t make sure “what you see is what you get.
9. Managers often buy the package instead of the product. This means that you should try to look beyond a candidate’s qualifications and presentation and see the actual person.
10. Not setting expectations before hiring in order to decrease odds of later firing. Make sure to set out all on-the-job expectations so you and your candidate can be on the same page before committing to one another.
Knowing what to avoid will help you focus on what you should be doing. Developing future leaders, along with developing great systems, gives you tremendous leverage in your business. But you must recruit the best employee – the best person available for the position. Ultimately, understanding what you, the position, and the company need will help ensure that the candidate is not only right for the job but that the job is right for the candidate. So do your homework. And, remember it is better to hire slowly and fire quickly than to hire quickly and fire slowly.