How Do I Improve the Hiring Process?

Attracting the right candidate to your job interview can be a difficult process. Ensuring that the person you hire is the best possible choice can be even more difficult, especially if you make certain assumptions about their qualifications and behaviors. Follow these guidelines, and you’ll be able to vet candidates in the right way, and make much better, more informed hiring decisions.

How to hire an employee for culture fit

During the hiring process, it’s important to ask yourself a few simple questions to make sure you find the right person, who is the right fit for the job.

To find the right person, ask:

• Does this applicant fit with our company culture?
• Will they fit in with our teams here?

To find out if they’ll be successful in the job, ask:

• Are they the right fit for the job?
• Can they do the job?
• Can they deliver what we need them to deliver?

Anybody can act or behave in a manner that they feel will get them the job during an hour-long interview. To avoid these “landmines”, all you have to do is establish “deliverables or factors of success” that the candidate should be able to achieve in the future.

Establish factors of success to improve the vetting process

After discussing how there are two parts to every job, you can see that the same applies to the vetting process. Think about what deliverables are required for a candidate to be successful in their job 12-18 months down the road, and what kind of relationships need to be built to get there.

Deliverables typically will include:

• Metrics
• Daily tasks
• Long-term projects
• Sales volume

Building relationships might, for example, include working with:

• Finance
• Engineering
• Sales and marketing teams

Examine past experience rather than focusing on credentials

Instead of focusing on credentials to determine a candidate’s ability to do the job, ask open questions about their experience, and how well they’ve achieved their goals in the past. For example:

• “One of the requirements for this job is to be able to establish strong relationships with sales, engineering, and finance teams in our organization. Tell me about a time when you’ve had to establish relationships with different functional areas in your organization.”
• “One of the major projects in this job is to design custom equipment that can laminate three pieces of our product into a single package. Tell me about a time when you’ve designed and built a machine that can do that.”

Asking questions like these creates an opportunity to uncover the candidate’s past experience, and opens up a path for follow up questions. This way, you can be sure that the problems they have solved in previous employment are similar to the challenges they’ll face in your organization.

Become more effective in your hiring process for the greatest chance of success

Even the best, most effective vetting process still leaves room for error. However, you can mitigate any mistakes with a pre-hire behavioral assessment. Each assessment allows you to tailor what success looks like in the job, so you can match with ideal candidates and make much better, more informed hiring decisions. Get in touch to find out how CTA’s pre-hire behavioral assessments can help you find the right person for the job.