As a business owner, you’re wearing a lot of hats. You’re bringing in business, working with clients, and know you need to hire additional team members.
You might even be overwhelmed just thinking about your hiring process. Traditionally, you create a job description, recruit candidates, review resumes, and conduct interviews.
Yet, you know in the first five minutes if the candidate will be a good fit. In the meantime, you took a short-term detour from working on the strategy of scaling your business. If you skimp out on the onboarding process, you might just find that it leads to massive turnover only to start the process over.
Just thinking about the hiring process causes your brain to go into overwhelm. Before you go there, disrupt your traditional hiring process.
Let’s back up to the first five minutes of your interview. You know if the candidate will be a good fit.
What are those hidden elements? Just like you would pre-qualify a prospect, consider pre-qualifying your prospective team member.
When you create hiring process that pre-qualifies a candidate, you’re also helping the prospective candidate decide whether they can work in your environment.
Consider there are certain factors that are important for fit but that you don’t necessarily think to put in any posting or isn’t even part of your interview process, like working conditions.
One of my clients joked that their company provides them with a free gym membership and sauna, referring, of course, to their manufacturing plant which heats up to 80 degrees on a good day.
No sense in sugar coating the environment. If you hire the team member without having them experience the working conditions at some point in your interviewing process, they will likely leave at lunch on the first day causing you to again detour or delay your strategic goals.
When we were reviewing the hiring systems in one of our Profitability Labs, one of my clients realized how she could streamline her hiring process. Rather than just reviewing the resume, she had candidates complete a questionnaire before they were scheduled for an interview.
The questionnaire asked the candidates to explain their experiences with job duties they would encounter on the job if hired. If their experiences aligned with the position, they were scheduled for a phone interview.
One of the underlying elements of a good fit also included effective written communication skills as they would need effective written communication skills when emailing clients. In the pre-qualification process, they would need to provide written answers to questions. This assisted the employer in evaluating the candidates.
There are two major benefits to setting up a pre-qualification process that prequalifies your candidates.
1. You will be able to determine if they have a desired skill set before a formal interview. This pre-qualification hiring process saves you and your existing team valuable time; and
2. You engage the candidate early in the process. They also get to evaluate if they want to continue to apply for your position. If not, you didn’t waste your valuable time with someone who isn’t enrolled in working with your company and the environment.
Whether you’re hiring an independent contractor or an employee, disappear your hiring overwhelm by disrupting your traditional hiring process. Establish a pre-qualification process that reveals hidden elements for success on the job.
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