Hiring advice – HR ADVICE CENTRE

How to Attract the Talent You Want

Treat every candidate with respect for their interest. Whether you are recruiting inexperienced new graduates or C-level executives, give every candidate the respect they deserve as people. Being honest, open and professional is critical to candidates’ perceptions of your company. Never violate this rule in your talent-finding formula.
Create a professional hiring process; then follow it. Explain the hiring process to all candidates; follow it religiously. Depending on the authority level of different jobs, you’ll need to vary your process at times. However, to maintain your professional credibility, you must follow the process you have explained to the candidate.
Design a positive process for candidates that don’t “make the cut.” Have you experienced the horrors or heard about other candidates who were told that they would hear from a company after an interview, only to hear nothing? Employers who practice this “policy” must not realize the damage they do to their reputation and brand. Candidates have friends and family who are also consumers and can refer other talented people. Outstanding leaders develop a formula that offers dignified ways to deliver a professional “no” message.
Create a hiring formula that gives you flexibility. Your recruiting and hiring formula should recognize that you may sometimes need candidates with unusual educational or behavioral qualifications specific for the job, department or team. A winning talent-finding formula allows you to be consistent, but flexible when necessary. If you want to consistently attract the best talent, make flexibility your trusted partner.
Create a pleasant “candidate experience” for all job seekers and recruits. You might compare this component to the popular branding goal of creating a positive “customer experience” for all consumers who contact your company. Treating all candidates with respect, keeping your hiring process consistent, and having a professional communication strategy for non-hires increases your probabilities of attracting and hiring the best talent available.

Consider using some or all of these suggestions to create your effective plan and winning recruiting programs. If these features sound like basic human courtesy and respect more than textbook HR principles, you’re right.

Whether you are recruiting for a part-time mail clerk or a Vice President of IT, the candidate will judge your leadership ability—and your company—by the way you manage the hiring process. Your company faces no more risk when hiring a lower-level employee than when interviewing executive suite candidates. Your professional hiring process should be consistent for all candidates.

For example, the inexperienced part-time candidate may have an older sibling or family member who is eminently qualified for an open executive position. Further, lower level candidates may not be shy about telling everyone in sight about the treatment they received when interviewed by you or your company. If it was a positive experience, he or she may sing your praises. Conversely, if it was a negative experience, the candidate may be equally vocal in recommending that family and friends not buy your company’s products or services.

Join the fraternity of outstanding leaders by designing a professional, effective talent-finding formula. Your career and employer will reward you many times over.

Conducting Effective Reference Checks

Conducting reference checks on your candidates can sometimes be considered unreliable. What are the key ingredients of an effective reference check? This is an important part of performance management. If you don’t get this right, you will hire the wrong people and you will pay the price for those decisions for months, or even years.

What Can Go Wrong?

Here are some of the reasons that many managers have little or no faith in the reliability of checking references:

The candidate only provides referees who will give them a glowing report.
The referee has a grudge against the candidate and slants their reference in an unfairly negative manner.
The referee gives you a positive report, because they are afraid of the legal ramifications of saying anything bad.
The referee is restricted by a company policy that limits what they can say about previous employees.

Is it any wonder that checking references has attained a reputation of being a far-from-exact science?

Opinion Versus Fact

Think back on the last time you were asked to give a reference for an ex-employee of yours. Chances are that most of the questions you were asked sought your opinions of that candidate. Questions like:

“What did you think of the person?”
“Did they do their job well?”
“Did they get on with other employees?”

Opinions can differ greatly and are not a reliable source of data upon which to make a decision as important as hiring someone (no matter what their level of responsibility in your organization).

If, however, you ask for facts (or to verify facts already given to you by the candidate), there is far less liability. A fact is a fact. It either is what it is, or it isn’t.

So, let’s turn this around and focus on the results that were achieved in the previous jobs, i.e. what was their performance?

Focus on Performance

What do you want in your new employee? Above all, you want someone who will produce the results expected of them.

What is the most valid way of determining their ability to produce results for you? Well, just look at their past record of results! If they have a proven record of results in a similar job (or environment) in the past, there is a very good chance they are capable of producing results in your job.

This is not guaranteed, of course. Reference checks are but one of the elements to consider when making a hiring decision.

Focusing on performance is the key factor to note in this entire article. It will make the difference between easy and effective reference checks, and checks that are difficult, or equivocal.

The Best Approach

Perform your reference checks after you have interviewed the candidate. Make sure that, during the interview, you established the candidate’s actual results achieved in past jobs. “Actual results” usually means numbers. It’s how many in what period of time. What were the statistics? The whole thrust of this part of the interview should be to look at their performance in the previous jobs they have held. This way, you have the specific results (numbers) that can be verified with the referee.

Who Do You Ask?

The basis of the reference check is to verify the candidate’s facts and figures with someone who is able to do so. But who are they?

The problem is that, without asking the candidate, you have no way of knowing who has the relevant information. You can’t simply ask the candidate, “Who can give you a reference?” If you do, you are inviting him or her to give you only people who will say nice things about them.

Rather than that, set the scene first by asking them a few pertinent questions about what they have achieved in the way of performance in their last few jobs. This could include such things as:

Statistical facts and figures (like their sales volume or the level of profit they generated).
Percentage increases in production (e.g. increased market share or reduction in outstanding debts)
New systems implemented (such as a new reporting system or a revitalized stock control process).

Now, having set the scene, the question that will evoke some really effective information is: “Who can verify these production results?” With this approach, a whole new world opens up for you. There are usually several people who can verify the candidate’s production results, including:

Their Manager (of course).
Their colleagues (who worked with them).
Their customers (who have no axe to grind).
Other department managers (who could observe their performance more objectively).

This wider range of names is particularly useful when the employee is still working at their last job and does not want you to contact their manager. This exercise should net you quite a few names to choose from. It is important to have choices, as you will see later in the discussion on cross-referencing.

The neat thing is that you don’t even have to mention the word “reference” when eliciting these names. They are simply people who can verify the candidate’s production record.

Avoiding the Problems

Now, let’s look at these problems we mentioned at the beginning and see how they stack up against this performance-focused approach to reference checks.

Problem 1: The candidate only provides referees who will give them a glowing report. This problem is almost completely eliminated with the above approach. By ignoring the list of referees supplied on the resume, you completely bypass the trap of only talking to people whom the candidate has carefully chosen as referees. If the people selected to verify the performance still have a tendency to give a positively slanted opinion (if asked), it is harder for them to slant the results. And, when referee statements are cross-referenced (see below), any holes that exist will show up.

Problem 2: The referee has a grudge against the candidate and slants their reference in an unfairly negative manner. Once again, this can be largely avoided if the referees are only asked about the results produced by their previous employee. They can still be negative, however, so this is where the cross-referencing comes in. For a start, you should do at least two reference checks per employer. If one of the two is not so good, do a third one as a cross-reference against the other two. If two out of three are good, the bad one can probably be put into the category of a “suspect reference”. You can always do more, if still uncertain. This is why it is a good idea to get several names of people who can verify the candidate’s results for each of the positions they have held (that we want to check). It gives you more choices, should cross-referencing become necessary.

Problem 3: The referee gives you a positive report because they are afraid of the legal ramifications of saying anything bad. Let’s face it, the reference check is seeking valid data upon which to make an important business decision. If the data is wrong, you can make a costly mistake. It is vital that you get accurate information. If the referee you are talking to is one of those people who is afraid of saying the wrong thing, you will find they are far more comfortable simply confirming facts and figures. They will only become hesitant when asked something that invites their opinion.

Problem 4: The referee is restricted by their company policy that limits what they can say about previous employees. Even this situation will at least be partly resolved when the emphasis is placed on the previous employee’s actual results on the job. Companies that have such restrictive policies generally don’t mind verifying production statistics, or confirming what positions the employee held and what functions they performed. The normal scenario here is that the restrictions limit the referee to only stating the employment duration and the former employee’s job functions. You can generally get more information, however, by digging deeper on the functional aspects. For example, “So, he was involved with collecting outstanding debts. Did the amount of outstanding debts decrease while he held the job?”

Conclusion

With a performance-focused approach to reference checks, you can definitely obtain valid information upon which to base your hiring decision. The reference check is, by no means, the main deciding factor. If done right, however, it can contribute powerful data to the decision process.

Smart Hiring Practices

Have you ever been charmed by an applicant? Hired a friend or family member and been disappointed? Kept poor performers long after they should have been asked to leave? Added up the costs of making a poor hiring decision?

Why is our gut feel about people such a poor indicator of success? Most of us want to like the people we meet: We naturally look for positive attributes and try to see a fit where one may not exist. However, in hiring, it is important to reduce our subjective opinions and develop better predictors of future success.

Research tells us that past behaviour is one of the most reliable predictors of future behaviour. Using techniques to uncover past behaviours — a behavioural-based process — will enable you to successfully recruit new team members who can perform well in the job and who fit your organizational culture.

The process begins with the development of a well-researched position description and culminates with a behaviourally-based interview process.

Create a well-researched job description

To create an effective job description, define:

Where the position fits into the larger organization
The outcomes of the position and the tasks required to produce them
The physical requirements of a job
The mental attitudes, unique skills, and competencies required
The expected performance standards

The two types of competencies are technical and behavioural. We tend to hire people based on their technical competencies — how long they have been doing a particular task, how much training they have, whether they are qualified in a particular skill, and so on. However, we tend to terminate people based on their behavioural competencies — how they act on the job. To determine your preferred behavioural competencies, make a list of the personal attributes of your top performers or others who have performed well in the job that you are filling. What were they like? Describe their style, values, and attitudes. Now you are beginning to develop an understanding of their behavioural competencies.

Job descriptions should be linked to performance — what the new employees are supposed to do and the standards by which they will be measured.

Ask yourself, “If my hires perform well, what results should we see? How could we tell if they were effective?” Now you are beginning to craft some useful performance measures. Ask the right people the right questions

Recruitment is the process of encouraging the appropriate applicants to apply for the job. Make sure your recruitment process reaches a wide audience. Don’t discount the importance of social media: Many jobs are advertised on Facebook and Linked-In, as well as online sites like Craigslist and CareerBuilder.com. Research the sites that might draw the best applicants for your opening.

In your job advertisement, be very specific about the competencies you are looking for. If you are looking for a high-energy individual who is self-reliant, able to work independently, and make quick and accurate decisions, then say so.

When you interview, don’t be fooled by a charming and friendly applicant. Be prepared with a process that helps you understand how an applicant has responded to key situations in the past.

It is very important to ask the same questions of each applicant to provide consistency between applicants and increase the validity and reliability of the interview. Develop a list of questions, keeping them short and realistic. Design questions that ask for examples of past behaviour. For example, “Tell me about a time you had to deal with a really difficult customer. What did you do and what was the outcome?”

For each question you develop, make sure you have also determined what you believe is an accurate or effective answer. Judge your candidate against what you have decided is the kind of answer that fits your organization.

Be careful not to use leading questions, as this may prime applicants to give you the answers they think you want. An example of this is: “We think it is important to call customers by their first name. What is your approach to addressing customers by name?” Avoid trick questions or hypothetical questions like: “Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?” These have little bearing on a person’s ability to do the job, unless you are scoring them on creative thinking.

Finally, always respond to all applicants, even if it is just to say that you received their résumé but have chosen other candidates for an interview. Remember, every step of the application and interview process reflects on your company and a chance to build or tarnish your reputation. The recruitment and selection process should demonstrate your professionalism at every turn.

Five Tips for Hiring Seasonal Workers

It’s very common for organizations to look to the support of seasonal temporary workers to during peak production times. In fact, hiring seasonal workers on a temporary basis can be one of the best ways to realize a positive return on investment for your business because it’s less costly than hiring regular employees.

Each year, major retailers hire seasonal temps to help out during the holidays and support increased shopping demands. The biggest industries that use seasonal help are manufacturing, retail, hospitality, customer service, sales, and shipping and transportation. However, any company may choose to hire seasonal temps to cover summer vacations or maternity leaves for regular employees.

Seasonal assignments may last for a few days to a few months, depending on the need of each organization. During this time, it’s up to the company to provide training and supervision so that seasonal temps have the ability to be productive. There are some key ways that any business can get the most from their temporary seasonal staff.

Create accurate seasonal job descriptions. Your first step in maximizing seasonal staff ROI is to write seasonal job descriptions that clearly spell out the tasks and responsibilities of each assignment. Your seasonal workforce may have limited time to get projects completed, so make sure they are reasonable given the scope of work.
Provide training and resources to get the job done. Set up all seasonal work stations and systems in advance to make sure you get the more out of seasonal temps. Arrange for an orientation and training day, utilizing your seasoned employees as mentors to seasonal staffers. Give your seasonal workforce access to the information and resources to be successful.
Set clear goals and deadlines for tasks and projects. Your seasonal workers can only accomplish what you expect if you communicate this to them. Provide seasonal temps with a list of tasks they are to complete, along with daily and weekly goals. Provide reasonable deadlines for getting things done.
Give seasonal workers incentives to perform to highest standards. Seasonal workers often respond well to short-term incentives because they may not have access to the same benefits as your regular employees. Set fun contests and provide bonuses for top performers. Give seasonal workers incentives such as on-site lunches, wellness services, and discounts for merchandise.
Treat seasonal workforce with respect and offer some permanent jobs. The reason why some individuals take on seasonal work is to prove their worth for future employment consideration. Remember to treat all seasonal workers with respect and appreciation, offering a few the opportunity to become permanent employees based on their performance. You can find out who may be interested in perm placement by talking with your staffing agency.

Seasonal workers can be a valuable way to stay on top of busy production periods and project demands. Remember to make the most of your seasonal staffers by giving them rewarding assignments and interesting tasks.