How to Improve Your Hiring Process

Every hiring manager and company has their own unique hiring process. Depending on the needs of the company or previous experience, each hiring process can look different. If you’ve noticed that you aren’t getting the right candidates or your turnover rate has increased, it may be time to update and improve your hiring process. Use these 5 strategies to improve your hiring process:

Many candidates turn on their “interview mode” and say all the right things. It’s important to not just see the candidate in an office, interview setting, but rather outside of the interview. Take them on a tour of the office and have them interact with your team or take them out to lunch and see them in another setting. You may find that this “perfect” candidate that blew you away in the interview isn’t the candidate you thought they were.

After the initial contact or first interview, give them homework to do before you meet with them again. Have them make a plan or a strategy that they would implement if they were hired or give them a little project. Giving them that assignment will give you a good insight into their sense of responsibility and their ability to perform.

It’s easy to get in the habit of asking the typical interview questions. Obviously, the “typical” questions are common because they can bring out important insights. However, if you want to get a good understanding of what the candidate is all about, throw some curveball questions about how they would react in certain situations or ask them about their personal lives and passions. This can give you an insight into whether or not they really are a good fit for your company.

It’s common that you find your favorite candidate pretty soon into the interviewing process, and you might want to pull the trigger already and put an offer out. Before you commit, get a second and even a third opinion. Include others in the interviews with the candidate and see what they think. After all, the candidate wont only be working with but your whole team. Including more opinions in the decision can help ensure that you make the right decision about a candidate.

Often, you may not have the time to go deeply into the whole hiring process. That is, write the perfect job ad, go through tens or hundreds of resumes, qualify the best candidates, and then go through multiple rounds of interviews. Recruiting firms will do the bulk of the work for you. They will attract, search, and qualify the best candidates for you. That way, you will only have to interview and pick the best candidate for your company.