How important is it to you to have great people on your team?
Every business executive has a horror story of a bad hire and how much it cost the company. Not to mention their personal stress through the process of termination. It also distracted from accomplishing work goals.
Why didn’t the issues get tagged in the hiring process?
There are 2 parts to the answer: identifying what the job requires and properly sorting for those characteristics among your candidates.
Last week I had a speaker to one of my Vistage groups, Severin Sorensen, who made a great case for a behavioral job description. Carefully identifying what would be a great hire is the first part of the hiring process. We tend to know the skills and past experience we are looking for. What we may have not identified in the past is attitude and cultural fit. A behavioral job description would help you identify this.
Then, when you get a large pipeline of great candidates (because your job description was so compelling to all the right folks), you put them through a systematic process of testing and screening through phone interviews, and carefully prepared questions about their experience and attitude such that you get 2-3 great candidates through your funnel.
If you don’t think this is possible, get an outside expert to help. If you think it is too much work, consider what happened the last time you made a bad hire. How much time, effort and angst did that cause you and your team?
If you are about to make New Year’s Resolutions, consider putting time next year into improving how you hire. There is little more important to the success of your organization.
Illustration courtesy of http://www.seethewhizard.com/