Research indicates that time to fill vacant positions across U.S. industries are taking over 42 working days. Across the world, time-to-fill estimates are over 62 days.

When you consider payroll expenses, unproductive hours, like sick time, it’s more important than ever to make sure you fill that vacancy with a match that is a good one. If there’s a mismatch between the person and position, you’ll lose more than pay and benefit expenses. For customer-facing position, you’ll lose valuable training hours and destabilize knowledge transfer, productivity, and customer service.

Be a Hiring Hero

Being a hiring hero, involves more than understanding the work requirements for the position. Add on how the pandemic has changed where we work, attracting and hiring the best fit is tricky.

You can try different people in a particular job until you find one that is the perfect fit. However, that approach is a costly one.

Hiring The Best Fit

To have a distinct advantage in hiring the best fit, every business should have a well-defined hiring process. Consider these steps in your hiring process:

1. Define your company’s Contribution in the World and how the position contributes to that Contribution. Employees want to know not only want to be challenged in the position but they want to know how their job will contribute to the greater good.

2. Identify the work requirements for the position.

3. Outline the goals of the position, so that there is a clear understanding of how the person’s position will be evaluated and how it aligns with the company goals

4. Prepare an interview with focused questions about the candidate’s experience, skills, and abilities.

5. Conduct background references and screening.

6. Assess a person’s natural wiring, which reveals hidden strengths and natural motivation

Take the last point, assessing a person’s natural wiring. You may agree that people can be, at times, difficult to really know someone from an interview alone.

In one example, a well-qualified sales manager was not doing well when they took him out of an established business unit and transferred him into a brand new division and product line. The nature of the position was to grow this brand new division from scratch. It required someone who was naturally motivated to achieve results in a short period of time, juggle multiple priorities, create an infrastructure from scratch, and work in ambiguity.

On the surface, he seemed to be a fit with the requisite amount of sales and managerial experience. He exceled in the established division and had made solid long-term relationships. He was naturally wired to improve existing systems so the idea of creating something from scratch was just not in alignment with his natural wiring. He would naturally take a sequential approach by sending a letter to new vendors, calling them, then scheduling an appointment. This sequential approach hindered the required timeframes severely impacting the company’s other departments from launching.

In this example, the sales manager brought the right experience and knowledge to do the job. However, something was missing.

The way he would execute the requirements of the job to get the results were opposite of not only how he was naturally wired but what was required for the job. On a daily basis, he would need to work against his natural wiring, which could be draining over time. Regardless of how much money he was paid or how great a job seemed relative to his experience, it wasn’t optimal for either the employee or the employer.

Natural wiring tells us the environment in which someone thrives. Knowing a candidate’s natural communication preferences, most productive work style, thinking processes, and how they are best engaged in decision making enables employers to custom fit a candidate to a job that naturally motivates them to succeed.

Be a hiring hero by creating an environment where everyone wins. Matching up the ideal wiring for a position and the candidate’s wiring can mean the difference between success or failure in the job and for your company.

Invitation

To learn more about your human wiring, join us online or onsite for Wired to Win 101: How Are You Hardwired on February 23, 2022.