5 Expert Tips for Hiring the Best Employees

Tips for Hiring the Best Employees

What makes a good employee? Is it someone who ticks all of the right boxes and has the right amount of experience or is it someone who has the right values for the company? As an employer, you should want someone who will go-that-extra mile and who will get along well with everyone else who works in the office.

The great thing about this job market, in which many companies are not hiring as they are still recovering from the global financial crash, is that you have the luxury of a huge pool of candidates to choose from.

With the gig economy transforming the way people work and many people working multiple roles, as an employer you don’t need to hire fresh out of college grads who fulfill your needs, you can hire employees who already have experience of selling themselves and their services. 

Here are five top tips on hiring the best. 

1. Word of Mouth

One of the best ways of figuring out how to hire good employees is through word of mouth. By networking with other employers and keeping your ear to the ground from social circles and even family members you might hear of someone suited to the role you are advertising.

Whilst it would be wrong to ignore all the other applications, as this would be considered nepotism, it would be fine to reach out to someone and suggest that they should apply.

Word of mouth recommendations are also good for hiring the right employees because they ensure that the person is usually going to meet your requirements and be a good candidate. If they aren’t it will reflect badly on the person who has recommended them.

2. Values over Experience 

In the past, there was a set of skills you needed for a job and that was it. Today companies often focus on values. What values and qualities in a person do you look for in an employee?

And what kind of person would the rest of the team get on with? Equally, what are the values and what is the ethos of the company? How will your new employee fit in?

You might, for instance, want to establish whether they use drugs and would ever use products to stop themselves from failing a drugs test. You can read more here

These are all questions which are often far more important than whether the person applying has the experience to complete the job. 

The fact is most jobs these days are quite specialized. Every company has its own systems and work methods so whoever you pick is going to need some kind of training for the first few weeks anyway. 

Determining an interviewee’s values can only be done at the interview stage. 

3. Don’t Always Pick Someone Who Looks Good on Paper

A candidate who applies to a job with first class honors in Mathematics from Oxford or Harvard University and a masters on top is always going to raise eyebrows. Maybe the applicant also has years of experience under their belt as well.

There are always more qualifications to be taken, like these eight business certificates that can boost your prospects. But qualifications alone can’t compensate for candidates who are socially awkward and find it difficult to interact with you and the other employees.

Sometimes it is far better to pick someone who has the right social attributes and who you know you are going to be able to have an important conversation with if something goes wrong. And that might mean picking someone on paper who looks like a weaker candidate. 

4. Interview as Many as You Can

Applications can be deceiving and can easily be embellished or exaggerated so it is better to try and arrange interviews with the vast majority of the applicants. This can be time-consuming and may require you to devote a few days to the process.

It could also involve you delegating interviewing to other members of staff you trust so that you can interview more than one person at a time. 

At the interview try to get a sense of the applicant’s personality and do not simply read generic questions from a list. Open up a dialogue with them. Make them feel comfortable rather than putting them under too much pressure. 

5. Read All the Applications 

On average there are at least 118 job applications to one position and many popular jobs can have over 500, even over 1,000, applicants. It can seem like a real mountain to climb to read all of them.

And it might even be tempting to pick applications at random or to place an in-house cut off point where you only read the applications that arrive within the first three days of the job being advertised.

However, you don’t know what kind of talent you are passing on if you don’t read all of them. There obviously needs to be some process where people who don’t meet the basic standards that the job requires are eliminated but the vast majority of applications should be read by yourself and the person who will be directly responsible for the new employee. 

Hiring the Best Takes Time

There are many processes involved in finding the best employee but it is not going to be a fast process. Sometimes the best candidate arrives on your doorstep but that happens very rarely. 

To find the employee that is right for you don’t look for the employee that ticks all of the right boxes on paper, with the best qualifications. Instead, give everyone a fair hearing. Read as many applications as you can including those that come just before the cut off point. And then try to interview as many as you can as well. 

If you’re interested in other stories relating to hiring the best employees, be sure to read our education and careers section by clicking here

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