Anyone with responsibility for hiring or promoting employees knows how frustrating it can be to choose a candidate that seemed right only to later find out that they weren’t a good fit for the job.
In the staffing world, it’s commonly known that a poor job fit results in lost productivity and excessive attrition – both costly issues for today’s lean organizations.
Choosing the right person amongst a pool of highly qualified candidates is not an exact science, but an art where the interviewer has to weigh the pros and cons of each individual. The first step in selecting the right candidate is to ensure that the job posting fully reflects the needs and requirements of the position.
A typical job ad focuses on what the employer wants from the applicant such as the academic degrees, specific skills and a strong work ethic. However, various studies confirm that ads focusing on what employers can offer to job seekers – like work autonomy, career advancement and inclusion in major decisions – result in better employee matches. It’s these types of ads that produce a larger number of better qualified applicants. One study by a Canadian consulting firm revealed that postings that focused on what the organization can do to meet the needs of the applicant received three times as many highly rated applicants as ads with that demanded specific traits from the applicants.
With the constant ebb and flow of the work force, with fragmenting, reorganizing and changes due to market fluctuations, another very important step in the selection process is asking the right interview questions. Having a good set of pertinent questions during the interview to see if the candidate has the attributes you need to grow your business and adapt to constant change is very important.
During the interview, you will be able to learn the answers to these highly valuable questions. Is the candidate highly adaptive? Are they team players? Do they see learning as pleasure? Discovering the answers to these questions will help in selecting the best candidate.
At the end of the interview process, if there does not seem to be a suitable candidate, then consider doing one of the following:
- Reconfigure the job so that the nature of the required skills and training are somewhat similar and so that the overall nature of the job becomes more common.
- Hire the candidate who most closely matched the requirements of the job and then plan for dedicated training to bring that person’s skills up to needed levels.
- Re-advertise the position.
The best tool at your disposal is to seek advice from a staffing firm or human resource professional. Hiring an HR consultant to assist you in staffing the position may seem costly at first, but choosing the wrong candidate will definitely cost you more.
