Contributors

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Hiring the Right People

Are you organized in your approach? (Does it make a difference?)

You bet it does!

Finding, screening, and offering positions to the best people is the biggest challenge for any organization.
If you have the ability to, it is often very helpful to work with a recruiting company to find potential candidates for you, that you then interview. This cuts down a lot of your work in trying to find people in the first place. However, regardless of if you are working with a recruiting/staffing firm or doing it on your own, to be successful you need to follow the steps below:
  1. Written Job Description: this description gives a full overview of all the tasks a person in the open role will be required to do, the skill sets required, and personality traits that would help a person in this role be successful.
  2. Job Want Ad: this is a written description that gives the title of the job, a few key tasks and personality traits for a successful candidate, and also includes an overview of the company and benefits of working within your group. Remember, the term “Ad” stands for “advertisement” – and the goal is to attract many people so you have a large pool of people to choose from.
  3. Interview Questions List: having a pre-set list of questions does several things for you during an interview – first, it keeps your thoughts organized, also it ensures you ask consistent questions to all candidates so their responses can be compared, but it also helps to prevent you from asking questions in an illegal manner. And while you always want to ask the general questions that enable you to get to know each candidate, you also need to ask very specific questions that enable you to gain an understanding of their motivations around work. What are their priorities? When home conflicts with work, what do they do? How do they prioritize? Deal with conflict? Solve problems? Cope with repetitiveness? Etc.
  4. Rating or Ranking Method: in order to remain objective it is always helpful to have some type of scoring or ranking system to enable you to ensure you are only offering positions to fully qualified candidates or to the candidate that best fits your needs. Sometimes you find that no one who applied fits the need, and that you need to look further.

Refining the Process: In a call center setting you have the opportunity to re-interview your best employees and to use their profiles as a model when interviewing new candidates. And as your business needs change, so will your ideal candidate profile. Don’t stop with where you are today thinking that what worked last year will keep working this year.

Retention: The goal of this process is that you will find people who are not only qualified and willing to do the work, but that you will also find those who want to work within your organization for at least two years or longer.


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