Traditional hiring practices just don’t work in today’s modern business climate.
We all know how confusing and tedious the hiring process can be for organizations. Hiring managers, owners, and leaders all have the same goal: to choose the very best candidates who will help make their companies successful. However, many businesses are using a broken selection process without even realizing it.
In Scott Wintrip’s new book, High Velocity Hiring: How to Hire Top Talent in an Instant, he speaks to streamlining your company’s hiring practices so your hiring can become faster, smarter, and better than ever.
The organizations that thrive are the ones that have perfected their selection processes. The newest hiring strategies allow you to maintain a steady flow of talent. This way, you can fill open jobs faster and quickly replace underperforming employees with better fits for your organization.
This allows everyone to focus on performance instead of managing bad hires or buckling under increased workloads while they look for the perfect candidate.
High Velocity Hiring is full of great tips to help you make better hires and ultimately increase the success of your company.
If you want to optimize your business’s hiring, keep reading for six guidelines to strengthen your selection process.
Have key talent ready before you need them. Vital roles, when left unfilled, can really detract from your organization. Not to mention, you get stuck managing the extra work until you fill the position. Don’t wait for an essential employee to give notice before you start recruiting—you should always be on the lookout for new talent. Just 30 minutes of recruiting efforts a week can result in a pipeline of talented people ready to step in as soon as you need them.
Enter the age of experiential interviews. You’ve likely been interviewing the old-fashioned way, but it’s time to innovate your interview methods. In standard interviews, candidates talk about their work, but this is a drain on time and fails to accurately assess whether the candidate is right for the job. For these reasons, many businesses have started doing experiential, “hands-on” interviews.
Experiential interviews let you witness a prospective hire doing sample work. For customer service roles, ask the candidate to help solve a customer’s problem. If you’re hiring for a sales role, ask the candidate to join you on a sales call. Watching the candidate do the work saves time and shows you whether or not they’re right for the job.
Avoid bad hires with a hiring team. A single interviewer may overlook crucial details during the interview process. As a result, newly hired employees may not perform as expected, and, over time, they burden the company. A hiring team can alleviate this common problem.
There are four hiring styles that people align with.
There are Tacklers, Tellers, Tailors, and Testers—and they each have different blind spots and strengths. When your hiring team embodies each of these styles, you can cumulatively identify red flags and choose the best person for the job.
Adopt a continuous referrals system. Use word of mouth to locate great job candidates and fill open positions with ease. It’s important to ask for referrals from all of your networks, including present coworkers, former coworkers (in good standing), other business owners, vendors, friends, and family members.
Spend just a few minutes a day in referral recon; it pays off in dividends. Make a quick phone call or email anyone you think might know a great person for your team. It’s nearly effortless and gets great results!
Diversify your workforce. Diversity in the workplace is a very good thing. Inclusive workforces allow businesses to better serve diverse client bases, and research indicates that the most diverse companies are likely to generate better financial results.
A few minor adjustments to your hiring profiles may drastically increase the flow of diverse talent. For example, I know of a large banking institution that required job candidates to have finance degrees. But they noticed that top candidates at competing banks didn’t have this requirement.
So they adjusted their own hiring profiles and started asking for candidates with any type of two- or four-year business degrees instead. Their flow of diverse talent increased immediately and resulted in some of the best hires they had ever made.
Network by recycling mismatched candidates. When you share your unusable job candidates with other companies similar to your own, everyone benefits. When you take place in a candidate recycling program, businesses pass along talented candidates that they can’t use instead of hoarding all the talent for themselves.
This form of networking allows the talent to flow and allows hiring managers to staff their organizations quickly with great workers. This type of arrangement can exist in the form of sharing agreements between competitors. Or, businesses can agree to “borrow” talent and temporarily loan out individuals to one another. They can even compensate other organizations for locating viable candidates.
It’s important to realize how healthy competition really is within an industry. It signals that an industry is viable, and healthy industries build opportunities for everyone. A candidate recycling program builds a stream of talent that everyone can draw from.
Overall, your employees can either make your company great or cripple it. This is why hiring faster, better, and smarter is so important. By optimizing your selection process, you can fill open seats quicker and finally build an organization made up of the best employees out there.
Scott Wintrip’s
