Checklist for Best Practices in Hiring
- Inculcate into your organization at large the overall strategic value of effective hiring, and of utilizing key resources to do so.
- Ensure through continued training that all major players in recruitment and hiring stay up to date in the various competencies required for effective hiring: working with internal and external recruitment sources, interviewing, reference checking, negotiating, closing. (See pages on this site about interviewing for more on that subject.)
- For a specific search, establish an interview brain trust and hiring project lead to own, track and troubleshoot the process from start to finish.
- Take input on the job description from those directly affected by the position, then get their buy-in for the final document.
- If using an outside search consultant, find an experienced and savvy spokesperson for your company and its values, and an advocate for your search. Just as you would empower your sales force with the best tools and knowledge for it to succeed in your market, likewise provide to your recruiter the business case for the position's existence, a list of target companies, the selling points for your company and position, and the challenges you face in the context of a plan for how the challenges will be met.
- Analyze a candidate's resume in advance seeking out the logic of his/her career history, ability to communicate, achievement orientation, knowledge base.
- Understand that candidates developed as part of a retainer search campaign are often not on the job market in general, and have been drawn in to consideration of an opportunity by the search consultant. But for any candidate, create a comfortable environment for mutual exploration, and one that presupposes any interviewer is a public representative of your company and its values.
- Take extreme care to maintain all candidates' confidentiality: never share candidate names outside the search and interview team.
- When interviewing, determine motivations, not just qualifications, to evaluate the odds for repeatability of success.
- Get to know more about the intelligence, adaptability and innate personal skills and strengths that will tell you more about repeatability of success in your environment. Using well thought out hypothetical situations can help here.
- While interviewing and reference checking, ask how, then ask it some more.
- Ferret out improvement needs.
- Establish and maintain relentlessly a timely and clear feedback loop among all the key stakeholders, e.g. hiring manager, corporate recruiter, outside recruiter, select interview team members. This includes candidate feedback as well as evolution of search strategies and even job descriptions.
- Think about what references you want; don't just automatically accept names.
- Reference the referencer: how long s/he has known the candidate, how well. How objective can the reference be?
- Cross-reference information and concerns among multiple references.
- Do not fail to sell the position and company, regardless of whether or not the candidate will be a likely hire.
- Hiring authorities need to be accessible to search consultant and creative about selling targeted top candidates. Work closely with your search consultant to develop the best and most personalized tactics.
- Negotiate compensation packages and hiring terms as much as possible with an eye on establishing future team values: take a win-win perspective, find quid pro quos.
There is no 100% security or guarantee for success in hiring. But one of the measures for any good approach is how much it lowers your risk of failure. And if you don't at least think through your approach consciously, and perform your diligence methodically, then hirer beware!
