How to Hire the Best Candidate

The New Year brings an assortment of possibilities for you and your company, and perhaps even new opportunities for hiring people to your team.  This is typically a multi-tier process that requires lots of effort to hire the best and most qualified candidates.  Posting job descriptions, sifting through resumes, holding interviews – these are tasks which should not be taken lightly, and often times the process can be tricky.  However, there are certain steps you can take to ensure you are getting the right candidates into your door, and ultimately the best for the job.

Job Description 

This should be constructed less as a “description” and more as an advertisement.  What opportunities will working for your company provide? It should read less like a “this is what you will be doing” and more like “this is what you GET to do!” Really sell your company, provide information about who you are and what your mantra is.  This will ensure excitement among the potential employees and encourage them to apply.  The more people that apply, the more talent you have to choose from.

Also, include a list of character traits you are looking for.  Experience is a good indicator of knowledge, but it doesn’t always mean that person will be the best fit for your team.  What is it that your company does, and what will they be doing in that specific role? Are you a team of strict and by the books professionals? Or are you a team of laid back designers? Try branching out from your typical phrases like “hard-working” or “analytical.”  Really get to the core of the job and your business, for example “we like to work hard to play hard” or “process oriented”.

Beyond the Resume  

What makes a good resume? Well, mostly it depends on who is looking at it.  Now that you’ve identified the job and what traits you are looking for, somehow you need to decipher which applicants fit this model based on their resume.  There are very basic things that separate candidates just by looking solely at their resume, typically education and experience.  Narrowing down a strong pool of prospects from these criteria should be the very first step.  The next few are a little more interpretive and variant.  For some roles, including mid to upper level positions, hiring based on experience may be the most practical.  For others, hiring based on experience may seem like the most efficient way, but does not guarantee you are getting the best person for the job.  Look beyond the resume at other credentials they have to offer such as a portfolio, writing samples, or even references.

And of course much of the interview process allows you to look beyond the resume as well.  Skype or phone interviews are often the first initial point of contact; these should also serve as an additional filter before the actual in person interview. A lot of companies have also begun to adhere to challenging prescreening techniques, such as having potential candidates take online personality tests or field-related quizzes.  All of this information is useful for finalizing the best possible team member.

Interview

So they have managed to make it this far, you liked what you saw and maybe what you heard, and now you invite them down for the interview process.  In many larger companies, interviews are conducted in rounds or stages, with the potential candidates coming in as many as two or three times.  This elongated interview stage can be eliminated by following the above steps.  These interviews should be with applicants you are seriously considering for the job.

Asking the right questions is of course the crux of every great interview.  There are lists of basic interview questions that can be found in any corner of the internet or among interview materials, however, I find it difficult to grasp how you could expect to receive dynamic answers from basic questions.  We are trying to find the perfect candidate, aren’t we? Some hiring managers have informed me of the “rapid fire” technique in which they ask a serious of questions in quick succession to see how creative or interesting the replies are.  The company that I work for is very process oriented, so one of the interview questions was, “Explain how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to someone who has never made one before.”

Probe into their work experience by asking pertinent questions, how they handled certain kinds of situations, and what they expect to gain by working for your company.  This will give you an insight into their overall personality, how well they work under pressure, and a glimpse of their knowledge base.

And lastly, maintaining an open line of communication toward prospective candidates after the interview is key.  After all, you have asked them to jump through many hoops, giving them an estimated timetable of when they should hear back from you is very little to ask.