By Ross Campbell, Toronto Financial Services & Insurance Recruiter
Unsuccessful hiring is arguably the biggest problem in business today. Pardon the cliché, but the right people really do make or break the company, and hiring wisely is the key to improving a business. For years, clients and candidates have told me successful hires share the common characteristics of experience, knowledge, good judgment, and an understanding of people. These are the components of wisdom. How can we apply these factors to create a wiser hiring process? How can we hire wiser employees? In this blog series, we will explore these questions and dissect what I like to call Hire Wisdom: The 12 Keys to Successful Hiring.
1. Pipeline Talent
Proactively meeting passive candidates to “pipeline” them for upcoming opportunities is a must. When the time comes to fill a position, having pipelined talent reduces time constraints so you can focus on the quality and fit of the candidate as the main factors in your assessment.
2. Generate Referrals
Ask everyone you meet “who do you know?” and “what can you tell me about them?” Referrals are incredibly valuable; when someone is willing to essentially perform a reference check on a candidate up front, you know you are on to something.
3. Improve Recruiter and Hiring Manager Relations
More often than not, the search for talent suffers when recruiters and hiring managers are not on the same page as far as their communication or relationship.
4. Develop a Sourcing Strategy with a Team
Develop a partnership with a team and create a sourcing strategy together; set a search timeline in place and stick to the timeline.
5. Perform Quality Assessments
Interviews and assessments have evolved and most people are left in the dark. To flip the on-switch, stop using job descriptions offering a job and start using opportunity profiles offering a career. Stop telling the candidates what you want to hear and start controlling the interview. Start using wiser questions with top-grading interview assessments, with scorecards in your interviews, and most importantly, listen. Start to think about how to assess the candidates for their Wisdom Quotient (WQ) when assessing for their Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Emotional Quotient (EQ).
6. Seek Counsel
Surround yourself with industry and non-industry experts and ask what has made them successful and what obstacles have they have had to overcome.
7. Respect the Candidate
Wise candidates, especially passive candidates, will not put up with a hiring process or individuals in a hiring process who are not treating them with respect; they will walk away and spread the word about their bad experience. Pre-close the candidate ahead of time to ensure that you’re on the same page and their bottom line will be respected at the finish line.
8. Implement a Central Applicant Tracking System
Take diligent notes. Save your scorecards to a central location for future hiring to automate your calendars to keep in touch with the wiser candidates periodically.
9. Presenting the Offer and Closing the Candidate
Know exactly what excites the candidate about the position and what they are concerned about. Test the offer, prior to formally presenting it to ensure that it will be accepted. Present the offer face to face with enthusiasm, creating an experience for the candidate to have them sign on the spot preferably, or within 24 hours. Educate and coach the candidate on how to decline the dreaded counteroffer, to have them resign from their current position within 48 hours.
10. Perform Reference Checks
You need to double check your work before signing the candidate on board. Wise candidates do not give references of past employers who will speak poorly of them, so get the names of past supervisors in the initial interview to ask for those specific contacts as references at the final stages.
11. Onboard New Hires
You are not out of the woods yet as the wiser hires understand that the probationary period is just as much for them as it is for you; they will use this time to assess you, the role and the company. There needs to be an onboarding process that engrains them into the corporate culture and provides the right amount of support. The first day on the job is difficult for everyone, but it does not have to be.
12. Retain and Develop Talent
People change and your new hire is getting calls from your competition. You need to “rehire” your talent periodically and develop them in their career to give them a reason to stay. As a hiring manager, try not to lose that “first day on the job” attitude yourself, or you might lose your top talent.
By following these keys, you will find yourself with a wiser hiring process and ultimately hiring wiser employees. You now have the keys to Hire Wisdom; use them wisely.
Check out more of Ross Campbell’s blog posts and quotes and stay tuned for the rest of the series, where he will break down each of The 12 Keys to Successful Hiring.
IQ PARTNERS is a Recruitment Agency with offices in Toronto, Montreal & Vancouver, We help companies hire better, hire less & retain more. Our recruiters specialize in Marketing, Communications, Consumer Goods & Services, Retail, Sales, Technology, Finance & Accounting, Financial Services, Life Sciences, HR & Operations, and Construction, Property & Real Estate. IQ PARTNERS has its head office in Toronto and operates internationally via Aravati Global Search Network. Click here to view current job openings and to register with us.
