Has Hiring Become Broken At Your Company?

As a manager, you need to do a better job of hiring than everyone else
As a manager, you need to do a better job of hiring than everyone else
Image Credit: Ryan McGilchrist

As managers we know that staffing our teams with the best people for the job is a critical part of creating teams that can accomplish great things. However, all too often when you take a look at how a company is going about hiring people, you’ll discover that somehow the process has become broken. Lots of companies like to talk about making the hiring process better, but they don’t seem to know how to go about doing this. What needs to change?


One of the problems that most managers have is that they don’t hire all that often, so they aren’t skilled in interviewing, and don’t have the manager skills that they need. Additionally, they may not know the laws around interviewing. We need to understand that it’s not technically illegal to ask someone how many children they have; however, you’re going to make candidates uneasy. You need to know that it is unlawful to treat women differently than men based on the answer to that question. What you need to do is to create clear guidelines. You need to develop questions. Understand that some hard work before conducting an interview can help make the interview process run smoothly.


Limit Yourself To A Maximum Number of Interviews

If you are not careful, you can end up dragging potential candidates through round after round of interviews. Understand how quickly you want to bring someone onboard and if you’re not organized enough to make a hiring decision in two rounds of interviews, then put off hiring until you are. Understand that it may be challenging to get the whole team in the office on the same day, but do you really need all of them to interview each candidate? You need to remember that your job candidates are doing you a favor by coming in to interview. There is a good chance that they have to take time off their current jobs, and that is no small sacrifice. Since you are asking them to do this, make it worth their while. Ideally, your mantra for interviews should be one and done. Your rule must be never more than two rounds.


Don’t Use Old Job Descriptions

As a manager you understand that all jobs evolve. This is something that is very normal. However, when you pull out the job description used to fill this position in 2010, it’s not going to be the correct one. In order to prevent something like this from happening, when someone submits their two weeks’ notice, ask them to write up a job description before they leave. The person who had the job last knows better than anyone (including you) just what this job takes. Understand that your manager training doesn’t tell you that you have to hire a clone of the last person who had the job. You need to use this as a place to start and adjust as needed. The time to have this discussion is before posting the job, not after you’ve hired someone.


You Need To Stop Ghosting

Hopefully I don’t even have to tell you this — just don’t do it. Ghosting is when someone interviews with your company and then never hears back from you. It will come across as being rude and nobody wants to appear that way. It’s also counterproductive. Doing so will give you a bad reputation. If your company’s recruiters are too busy to send out a “thanks but no thanks” email to a candidate who interviewed, then either adjust their workload or get new recruiters who can learn how to use an applicant tracking system. In the end, there is no excuse for this.


What All Of This Means For You

Make your company a place where interviewing isn’t a tedious waste of time. Make it an essential aspect of good company culture. As a manager it is going to be your responsibility to make sure that the hiring process is done well. Keep in mind that the hiring process is often a candidate’s first experience working with the company and you want that to go as smoothly as possible. If you can get this right, then you’ll be able to attract and keep the high quality talent that you want to add to your team.


– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™


Question For You: How many times do you think that one person should interview with your company?


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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is the most precious thing that you own? Your home? Your car? Maybe an expensive watch or some jewelry? Nope, I can say with some confidence that the most valuable thing that you own is your time. This is the one thing that even with our manager skills none of us ever seem to have enough of and we would all like to find ways to get more of it. The biggest question that we all have to answer is just exactly where is our time going and are we wasting it?