Written by It has been estimated by the Society of HRM, Saratoga Institute that the cost of a bad hire is 1-2 time the employee’s annual salary. Go to IT Jobs for more information.
There is the cost of any termination payments, cost of hiring including advertising and recruiters costs, the administration time and lost time of your involvement not to mention that any new person is only at best 60% productive for the first few months while they learn the ropes.
It pays to get your hiring decisions right from the beginning. Hiring a new employee doesn’t have to be stressful or challenging. With a bit of preparation and work you will be more likely to hire the perfect person for your role.
So here are my top 10 tips for recruitment interviewing:
1. Prepare for the process: Before you advertise, take time to review the role and what you are looking for. Write down the skills and experience a high performer in the role will need to have, as well as the qualities that you are looking for in a great employee. These become your selection criteria – the things you measure each candidate against to check their match.
2. Set time aside: Book time into your diary to review applications, make appointments and interview candidates. Unless you schedule in uninterrupted time you will rush through the process and make poor choices.
3. Work out what’s in it for the candidate: Be clear why your business and this role is a great opportunity for candidates. You need to convince people to apply these days so work out why you stand out from other employers.
4. Listen more than you speak: When you get to the interviewing stage, you want to listen to the candidate more than you speak. Ask questions and don’t be afraid to probe for more information. Listen to tone of voice, ease of answering and clarity of answers.
5. Aim to get the best out of each candidate: You want each candidate to show you the best they can be. This is not a competition to see how they perform under pressure. Any interview is by itself a stressful situation. Work out ways to make it easy for them which could include giving them the main questions you are going to ask a few minutes before they come into the interview.
6. Take notes: After a long day of interviewing it is hard to remember exactly who said what. Try and take verbatim notes of answers as it helps when you are comparing candidates.
7. Make sure your questions are legal: All questions must comply with anti-discrimination legislation. This means you can’t ask questions about things such as age, marital status, if they have a disability, if they are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, if they are gay, if they are union members, their childcare arrangements or their religious beliefs.
8. Tell the truth: Don’t try and oversell a role or dance around negative parts of the job. You are more likely to get and retain the right candidate if you paint an honest portrait of the role and all it involves.
9. Make your next steps clear: Be clear to candidates on the next steps of the process. If you are going to conduct referee checks (and you should), check the contact details of referees. Explain when you will be making your decision and how you will contact them.
10. Keep your process fast: The best candidates don’t stay on the market long. If your recruitment process drags on you are likely to lose them. Aim for a quick yet thorough process, no more than 7 days in length from time of close of applications to decision.
There are a lot of factors that go into a success recruitment process. If you keep these 10 foundation points in mind you will be more likely to achieve the results you are looking for in filling your role.
Looking for a job is a stressful and tiring experience, spending days on end trawling through recruitment websites and constantly searching can often leave you disheartened and demoralised.
All this time you have friends and family criticising you for being unemployed and not having a job; the longer it goes on, the harder it seems to get back into work. The advantages of living the life of riley are there, but not many of us are millionaires and there are few of us who can afford to be out of work for an extended period of time. Refer to IT Recruitment for further information.
When searching for a job, recruitment services can be an alternative to undertaking the laborious task of job hunting yourself. Some however see recruitment services as their personal job hunter; this however is a common misconception. When you submit to recruitment services they will not pursue a course of action that will see them search for a job day and night until you find yourself in employment. They are not your personal recruitment expert and will usually only call you when they have a job that suits your capabilities and skills.
That is how recruitment services work; they have a list of prospective employees who have filled in forms showing what kinds of jobs they would be interested in and details of the qualifications candidates possess. The second part of their business includes companies who are looking to recruit and will employ their services to find suitable candidates.
If the interests and qualifications you have coincide with the needs of the employer, you will be cross-referenced and highlighted for that specific job. Sadly, if your interests and qualifications do not match any of the jobs in the database, it is unlikely the job offers will come rolling in.
To increase your chances of success it is worth utilising as many recruitment services as possible. If you pin all your hopes on one it is unlikely you will experience any success. Looking for work is a game of probability, by joining as many recruitment services and applying for as many jobs as you can, you increase the chances of returns on applications and job offers.
Keeping your own efforts up is vital, it may seem that employing recruitment services is the easy way to find a job but it is still worth pursuing jobs and vacancies under your own steam, a lot of the time it is your own efforts that will yield the most success.
Being proactive is vital when in a job hunt, it is easy to become demoralised and then sit back and not care anymore. Especially when benefits seem an enticing way to keep you on or above the breadline.
My advice however is to be proactive, even if you only do a couple hours a day, as long as these hours are spent searching with intent, that is not a problem. You should see recruitment services as more of a complimentary effort outside of your own job hunting activities, they will not do it all for you and pursuing your own course is essential.
Getting a good idea of what you want to do is also helpful, recruitment services do not like to deal with applicants who have little idea what industry they would like to enter. The perfect candidate for an agency is someone who has experience in a certain sphere of an industry with a clear idea of the job role they are pursuing. For anyone who is trying to change their job role, or even the industry they are working in, they may find recruitment services somewhat apathetic to their goals.
The services recruitment agencies provide are extremely worthwhile, but they will only be successful for a small number of their clients. If you have an uninspired approach to job hunting and have no clue what industry or type of job you would like to enter you will be better pursuing jobs yourself. That said, as the job hunting game is all about probability, increasing your chances in any way is highly advisable. For more information visit Tafadzwa: Jobs in IT.
