The Ultimate Guide to Building a Better Workforce: Part One – Hiring for Success

Hiring new employees can be a difficult and long process. To make it easier, EBSCO has outlined our top hiring tips, courtesy of Accel5.

Your employees are the single most important factor in the success of your company. Hiring the right employees will significantly increase your company’s productivity and profits, while the wrong employees will waste time, energy and money.

However, as many managers and human resources professionals know, finding and hiring the right person can be difficult for any company. To help with this process, EBSCO has outlined critical tips to hiring the best employees for your organization, courtesy of corporate learning tool Accel5.

Attract Top Talent

The first step in the hiring process is getting the right candidates to apply. Attracting high-performing employees can be difficult for many organizations, which means that their hiring process is over before it began. In the book Talent Management by Mark Miller, summarized on Accel5, Miller outlines useful strategies to attracting and keeping the best employees.

To attract top employees, you must have a thorough understanding of their values. According to Miller, the three factors most commonly valued by top performers include exceptional leadership, opportunities for career advancement, and organizations that make a positive difference in the world. Be sure to highlight how your company meets these criteria through your company website, social media handles, job posting sites and during the interview process. To attract and keep top talent, your company should be prepared to consistently deliver on these promises well after new employees have been hired.

Begin with a Big Pool

In the business book summary for The Best Team Wins, available on Accel5, author Adam Robinson claims that hiring the right employees can be a simple numbers game. For example, Robinson believes that to find the perfect candidate, you should review at least 130 résumés. From these 130 people, 27 should be selected for a phone interview, and then nine of these candidates should be invited to the office for an in-person interview. After the interview process is complete, you should have three excellent finalists.

Narrow the Results with a Candidate Scorecard

Candidate scorecards are a quantitative and effective method to determine which candidates are best qualified for the job. Robinson recommends using a five-point scale to determine how a candidate rates on a set of skills, which should fall into the following categories:

Performance results. This category will help you assess if the candidate can produce quality work and achieve predetermined goals. To evaluate a candidates’ capacity for performance results, ask questions such as:

• What role has quality played in your overall performance?
• What have you done in your last job to increase the company’s revenues?

Performance factors. This category will help you to discover how a candidate’s job knowledge, problem solving, decision making, innovation and creativity skills rate. To learn more about a candidate’s performance factors, ask:

• How good are your organizational skills?
• What is your process for analyzing a problem that needs to be solved?

Interpersonal skills. This critical category will highlight how the candidate works with others, and how they communicate information and ideas. To assess a candidates’ interpersonal skills, ask them:

• What is your communication style?
• Do you like working with other people?
• Who’s the best boss you’ve ever had, and why?

For more information on candidate scorecards, and to see an example, read this Harvard Business Review article.

Be Willing to Negotiate

After investing time and resources in the hiring process, you do not want a top candidate to decline your job offer. To prevent this, you should be open to having honest conversations with the candidate. Before making the offer, ask the candidate about their expectations and if they have other job offers pending. Determine if their initial expectations are realistic for your company and aligned with industry standards. From there, you should communicate the salary and benefits that you are willing to offer. Leave the conversation open for any questions or concerns. Once the employee has accepted, send over their written offer.

Learn More

Here is a glimpse into an Accel5 microlearning video, 3 Things to Look for When Hiring, featuring Jason Jeffay, CEO of Jeffay Consulting Group. To learn more about hiring, download part one and request a free trial of EBSCO’s Accel5. This microlearning tool offers more than 100 videos, business book summaries and articles to help implement the perfect hiring process for your organization.

Download Part One: Hiring for Success of our six-part series: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Better Workforce. Be sure to return here for Part Two: Corporate Learning on a Budget.