Hiring Quickly? Start with These 3 Tips
Hiring isn’t a walk in the park. It takes time and effort to find, attract, review, interview and hire candidates. On one hand, this is a top priority for hiring managers, but on the other - it is exhausting because it’s not their trained profession.
If hiring isn’t your day to day responsibility, it can be daunting; even if you’ve hired dozens of employees over the years - it can still be exhausting. Here’s a few pointers to help you get started with the consideration process if you’re wanting to bring on a new employee quickly.
Know What You are Looking For.
Time is of the essence, both for your roadmap and for the candidate acquisition process. So, start by making a list of qualifications that your new hire must-have and commit to them.
→It's a given that in ANY new role, there will be a learning curve for a new employee. So when interviewing, try to uncover your candidate's experience with the must have requirements that you've committed to.
For example, if you are hiring for a Project Manager and they need Agile experience, Budget Management, and Software Development Lifecycle experience - designing an interview with questions that will uncover their recent experience regarding those subject areas will bring about their skills and abilities and will also give you a window into how recently they've worked with those skills.
If they don’t have a recent use case or example, it's likely it's not part of their current operating rhythm and that might indicate that they'd have a greater learning curve given you need someone experienced in those areas. So create a data set and compare and contrast candidates across the same structured set of questions.
If you aren’t prepared and ask random questions irrelevant to your hard and fast requirements - you’ll unfortunately continue striking out. While a bit of flexibility, trust and first impressions go a long way, you want to be making hiring decisions based off of data-driven interviews. PRO TIP → Arm the candidate with your interview questions, you’ll see how well they’ve prepared and you won’t catch them off guard.
Interview for Potential.
You've shortlisted several candidates and now it's time to interview. If someone has years of experience - including experience with your requirements - a powerful question to ask is “How would you come up to speed with NEW responsibilities?” They've demonstrated that they have done so in the past, but you want to get to the deets on HOW they’ll go about quickly coming up to speed with your team.
Again, every new role will have a learning curve along with new tools and techniques - so learning how someone will apply their resourcefulness will be a good indicator for the potential they bring to your company. Uncovering their aptitude and approach to learning will provide you with insights to where they’d need support to become proficient with new tools and processes.
Most of the time - new challenges, new tooling, new experiences are EXACTLY what top talent is looking for. They aren't seeking a repeat of what they've done and your role could provide that challenge.
WIN <> WIN. They get a challenging new opportunity, and you get a competent and productive professional who has all the people skills, the soft skills you need, plus the aptitude and attitude to go out and do what it takes to execute on new challenges so you can achieve your roadmap goals… and even tackle those on the backlog.
Move Quickly.
Knowing the market is very active, your competition is possibly moving quicker than you are. In addition to arming the candidates with the interview question set so they can prepare in advance, be sure to work with your recruiting partner to have a seamless process that doesn't stall or lack urgency. Candidates want to feel wanted and you can demonstrate your desire to bring on great talent by moving quickly. If you don't, it's likely that you'll lose great people to your competition.
Candidates are smart, they’re interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing them. An interview process is a two way street and finding connection or common ground is often what wins out. Creating an experience that keeps candidates engaged, involved and informed through the process not only helps with their consideration of your company and culture but once you get to offer letter stage, it helps make your and the candidate’s decision a lot easier.
Often, hiring managers are shooting from the hips, without a plan of action, trying to find the right person… in the end, leaving them lacking confidence in their process, worse yet, leading to costly hiring mistakes.
Need recruiting support? We can help.
ITEOM Digital Technology Talent Partners is a trusted partner when it comes to finding great talent. We work with hiring managers to help them identify, interview, assess and onboard great talent. Equally, we work with candidates to help them align their purpose and passion with top employers. The interview process is hugely important in making sure your candidate and employer experience is exceptional. #SBA Certified #EDWOSB Reach out at workwithus@iteomtalent.com.