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By Kevin Flemming
Business Journal Columnist
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Wouldn’t it be great if you only had to interview people who were qualified for the job you’re trying to fill? If you could shorten the time it takes to hire new employees - would your company save money? Would you be happier if you knew that you could always get the best candidate for the job (rather than the best available)? You’re about to learn a secret that will help you to accomplish all of this.
Some of my peers in the local business community are surprised that I divulge so much proprietary information in this column. They wonder why I’m not worried about other professionals stealing my ideas when I describe successful recruiting practices. For the record, I’d be thrilled if more companies in the region would “steal” these ideas because it would help to improve the environment for both employers and high performing job seekers.
So I invite you to make better hiring choices without having to commit additional resources to your recruiting process. You won’t have to steal anything because I’m giving the secret away; under the condition that you put it into practice the very next time you hire.
Profiles improve recruiting results
The word for the day is Hiring Profile. Just as a position description lists the duties and performance standards of a job, a hiring profile outlines the requirements that a person must meet to be capable of a specific job. With very little effort, a small business can improve the results of their recruiting activity by attaching a hiring profile to the job description.
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The profile organizes all hiring criteria under three categories: hard skills, soft skills and background. Hard skills can be validated and include areas such as computer software knowledge, typing speed, or knowledge of business processes. Soft skills include personal abilities like a strong telephone voice or professional demeanor. Although these areas are more difficult to quantify, standards for measurement will be identified in the hiring profile. Background is self-explanatory and includes education and work history.
By creating the hiring profile, an employer establishes uniform requirements for a job and demands that potential employees measure up to them. The end result is an easier, shorter path to identifying the best-matched candidates and, ultimately to making better hiring decisions. You can create useful hiring profiles for nearly every job in your organization by following a few simple rules.
Metrics key to successful hires
First, get everyone involved who should be involved. Some companies place recruiting responsibilities on one person, such as the human resources professional, an executive or even an office manager. But most jobs today require the employee to support several people throughout the company. Bring in the managers whose areas are impacted by the job and solicit their opinions of the hiring criteria. This will sometimes reveal important requirements that have not been met by previous employees. If you ask good questions, a manager will most likely share a story that illustrates how a specific skill should be evaluated.
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The second rule is that all criteria must be measurable, and all candidates must measure up in order to be hired. Determining the metric is the key to making this tool work for you. This is simple when reviewing a background requirement, such as previous supervisory experience. Evaluating a candidate’s hard skills can be more involved. In our firm, we test administrative candidates in Microsoft Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. A candidate who has experience using these programs will demonstrate his/ her knowledge by performing several functions in a testing version of the software. This enables us to measure an individual’s ability based on a quantifiable score.
Assessing an applicant’s soft skill requires you to transform subjective opinion into a standard measurement. By isolating one or two specific characteristics for each requirement, and noting whether or not a candidate demonstrates them – you can determine if he meets that particular criteria.
Once complete, the hiring profile becomes the template from which all candidates are evaluated. In practical use, a job seeker who responds to your specific solicitation can be evaluated according to this profile from the first contact. If his resume reflects the appropriate background criteria, you may decide to have a telephone conversation with him. If you can identify some of the required soft skills over the phone, you then invite him to interview.
Don’t keep it a secret
The primary objective of the hiring profile is to ensure that candidates are being compared to each other by the same criteria. This eliminates inconsistent hiring practices within the organization and enables a company to quickly identify those people who best match the requirements. It also makes the hiring process faster for the company, understandable to the candidates and easier for the managers. Please don’t keep it a secret. |
