A business has many areas that it needs to fill to operate efficiently. However, if a company doesn’t have the right hiring and recruiting strategy in place, the efforts to fill these positions sometimes inadvertently lead to a string of employees that don't quite fit the place they were hired to fill.
The success of an employee in a job starts off with how the company recruits and presents the opportunity to the candidate in the first place. Below, we asked 15 experts from Forbes Coaches Council to shed light on how businesses could improve their methodology for finding and hiring the best talent for the job.
1. Hire The Person, Develop The Skill
Most recruiting efforts focus on hiring for certain skills, experience or industry expertise. While in many cases that is important, make sure the primary focus is hiring the right person. Ensuring the candidate is a fit with the organization, has the right attitude for their job, is a complement to the team and has a desire to learn will help you land the right person—then develop the skills. - Brent C. Carter, Leadership Excelleration, Inc
2. Become A Magnet
First, make your place a great place to work. Second, enlist your employees to tell the good story and incentivize them to bring in the "best and brightest" that they know. Bringing in someone they care about creates a vested interest in making the new hire wildly successful; it becomes a "virtuous cycle." Third, launch a media campaign so that prospective candidates can't wait to join! - Rebecca Lea Ray, The Conference Board
3. Screen For Emotional Intelligence
When I worked in France, the best practice was for candidates to complete handwriting analysis. I never bought into the idea, preferring behavioral-based interviewing, which we are still fans of. We now advise it be supplemented by a pre-hiring assessment of emotional intelligence. When U.S. Air Force recruiters started screening for EI, they increased their ability to predict success by 300%. - Lee Eisenstaedt, Leading With Courage Academy
4. Focus On The Role, Not The Job Duties
When we understand the role the new hire needs to fill on the team, we can co-create a strategy with the hiring manager that focuses on behavior and impact instead of tasks and outputs. This can significantly open up the talent pool, create a long-term view of the investment, present a more compelling opportunity for the candidates and generate value for the team and the new hire more quickly. - Cyndee Blockinger Lake, Blank Page
5. Ensure Alignment With Growth Strategy
Could it be that the company is not doing a good job selling the culture and the vision? Strategy starts at the top of the organization. Make sure the hiring strategy is in sync with the growth strategy. Then sell the vision of the company—where it's going, why and what their role would be in it. People want to feel as if they can make an important contribution. People will self-select accordingly. - Steve Wakeen, Playbook Coaching, LLC
6. Improve Your Digital Presence
Consider beefing up your digital presence. If you haven't looked up your company online and on sites like Glassdoor, run, don't walk, and do that now. Many job candidates will do research, and if they can spy company culture issues or can't find information about the brand, that's a roadblock. Also, assess if the role has too many components and stop looking for a unicorn. - Maresa Friedman, Executive Cat Herder
7. Maintain An External Talent Pool
Don’t wait until you have a vacant role to start hunting. The best talent is highly courted by your competitors and will be expensive. Instead of being passive, define what great talent looks like for you and keep a constant watch for external talent that meets those requirements in the market. Bring in talent from this pool whenever you can, whether or not you have a defined role for them. - Eric Beaudan, Eric Beaudan Consulting
8. Look For People Who Share Your Values
Times are changing, and as a business, you cannot use the same strategy you used in the past when hiring your talent. Take the unconventional approach. Hire based on character and best fit for your culture. Simply hiring based on their resume merit is a thing of the past. Assess their passion, commitment, attitude, their communication skills and if their beliefs align with your organization values - Nadidah Coveney, CTM Consulting Group LLC
9. Utilize Data And Talent Assessments
To identify best-fit candidates, consider utilizing data and talent assessments to improve the effectiveness of your talent acquisition. By leveraging science-backed, objective data to inform your hiring decisions, you can determine the right competencies and values a candidate needs for each role—and more importantly, measure a candidate's potential performance before making the job offer. - Kathi Graham-Leviss, XBInsight, Inc.
10. Don't Rely On The ATS
With over 200 Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) on the market, and with legal compliance on everyone's risk tolerance scale, it has made it difficult for many companies to find good talent. Use the ATS to screen out, but do not depend on AI to essentially do the work for you. Clearly involve the hiring manager and the humans that will work with the person at the earliest interview stage convenience. - John M. O'Connor, Career Pro Inc.
11. Look For Diverse Work Experience
The best candidates bring skills, perspectives, and talents from a multitude of experiences that make your department or company exponentially stronger. Stop looking for people with eight and 10 years doing the same thing. Be willing to consider those who bring a diversity of work experience to a team. These are the people who will ask the probative questions and see your operation with fresh eyes. - Erica McCurdy, McCurdy Solutions Group
12. Apply Real Feedback Into The Design
Companies can take a human-centered approach in designing solutions for their recruiting and hiring challenges starting with the interviewee experience. Ask the most recent hires about their experience and uncover insights into how the company met their needs during the process. With a new understanding of what attracted your employees, generate new ideas to test and integrate into the strategy. - Jonathan Silk, Bridge 3 LLC
13. Write A Love Letter
Recruiting is marketing! Identify your ideal candidate and think of them like you do your target customer. What are their desires in this context? What do they want? Talk about them first before trying to tell them how awesome you are. Talk to them like Rupert Holmes does in "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)." Follow his formula and you're likely to find more candidates who are an awesome fit. - Sturdy McKee, SturdyMcKee.com
14. Ditch The Laundry List Of Requirements
A laundry list of requirements can deter many candidates from applying. Also, many times companies will list conflicting requirements like big-picture thinking and attention to detail. Do not list more than five skills you are looking for in a candidate. This will force you to prioritize and focus on what you really need to complement the skill set of your existing team. - Caterina Kostoula, The Leaderpath
15. Invite Rather Than Recruit
If I "recruit" you for my Super Bowl party or for my startup, I am essentially chasing you. Instead, why not invite participants to join your team, with small tasks (almost games) that both showcase your culture and weed out those too lazy to do more than post a resume on a recruiting website? What values would you highlight first? Regardless, you will only end up with those who want to play. - John Hittler, Evoking Genius
