strategic hiring

Making the Same Hiring Mistakes?

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When you keep making the same hiring mistakes over and over, it’s costly and very time consuming. You lose credibility with your staff and clients. It’s time to stop and get help. You have a misperception of potential employees’ work experience, skills, and/or job fit required. With clarification and by learning new ways to interview, how to use qualified assessments, and how to improve your due diligence processes, you can improve your hiring results. (BizSavvyHire.com)  Hopefully, it won’t be too late to rebuild your credibility.

(c)Jeannette L. Seibly, 2013

Helpful Hint:

Job ads with trite sound-bites fail to attract, e.g., great opportunity and work hard. Learn how-to attract the right employees: http://BizSavvyHire.com

 

 

 

 

Easily Infuse Objectivity Early In Your Hiring System

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Did you know that requesting applicants to email or mail you resumes is outdated? Or that over 50 percent of resumes stretch the truth? Yet many companies rely solely on this data to select candidates for interviews—a poor selection practice. By doing so, they shortchange the goal of collecting good objective, valid, and reliable data in order to net truly qualified applicants.

Your hiring system speaks volumes: it’s the first impression many have of your business. Failure to utilize current technology has savvy job seekers questioning if you are a leader—or could be—in your industry. Failure to follow-up and communicate applicant status frustrates many. Top performers wish to work with winning bosses and companies that respect their time and efforts.

Using a well-designed applicant tracking system (ATS) is cost effective and allows you to post job ads and showcase your company, products, and services. It attracts qualified candidates, operates without paper, and helps you vet applicants, saving hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars. When strategically planned and followed, an ATS infuses objectivity into your hiring system early on.

Time-saving keys for ATS:

1) Require that an application form be completed. It minimizes truth-stretching (e.g., inaccurate job titles, job duties, company names, dates of employment, and titles).

2) Incorporate pre-screen questions and core value assessments to ensure objective, valid, and reliable data is used to select candidates for the next steps while weeding out unqualified ones.

3) Automatically thank applicants and make it easier to communicate with them. It’s critical to remember your applicants are future clients, vendors, suppliers, and decision-makers for awarding contracts. You want them to have a positive impression of your company. (Read Hire Amazing Employees, Second Edition for further time-saving ideas, available at BizSavvyHire.com.)

All ATSs are not all created equal. Factors to consider when choosing your ATS (taken from Hire Amazing Employees):

  • User-friendly sites can be reached within one or two clicks from the social media site or the job posting. Busy professionals need to be enticed the moment they read your online ad; most will not return—even if they have the best of intentions to do so. Make it easy for them to apply and for you to receive their information in order to infuse objectivity in your decision-making process.
  • Is there a fee for posting your openings on the ATS site?
  • What is the cost for setup and maintenance of the site?
  • Can the application form, job posting, and other pertinent information be customized?
  • Will it notify interested applicants of future positions? (That’s a great way to keep your candidate pool filled.)
  • Do your job openings easily post to job boards?
  • Can you collect EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) information? Tracking may be required if you have any government contracts (or if you are a subcontractor).
  • Is there a human verification process to reduce spam? This process prevents hackers from completing your application form and blasting resumes to you.
  • Is it easy to communicate with candidates inside the system and generate automated notifications (e.g., completion of application, request for interviews, etc.)?

©Jeannette L. Seibly, 2013 All Rights Reserved

Want an award-winning ATS to attract amazing employees to your company? Click here

Jeannette Seibly has been hiring amazing employees for over 34 years. She delivers straight talk with immediate results to business owners and executives of $1MM to $30MM enterprises, achieving dynamic results. You may contact her at JLSeibly@SeibCo.com to discuss your hiring challenges. Get her newest book, Hire Amazing Employees, Second Edition: Improve Your Profits (and Your Work Life)! http://BizSavvyHire.com It includes templates for interviews and reference checking.

 

Avoid Costly Hiring Blunders

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Many business owners and executives often find hiring a painful process. A challenge they hate. As a result, they rely heavily on the interview as a major decisive factor, which only provides hiring success a shocking 14% of the time! Sadly, this creates costly hiring blunders. They often forget to include other equally important indicators in their hiring decision process. The goal of any hiring system? Collect enough of the right information to make solid decisions.

Applicant Tracking System can help you attract great candidates and simultaneously provide factual details of their past employment, education and skills. Select a tracking system that is user friendly and can be reached within one or two clicks from social media sites or other venues. The beauty of these systems is you capture their attention now and have them complete the application form at the same time. Remember this important distinction: a resume is a marketing tool, but an application is a legal document that requires actual dates of employment, salary and titles, to name but a few of the facts provided, that all help you make better-informed decisions.

Qualified Assessments allow us to see the whole person. Nearly 90% of a candidate’s true self is frequently camouflaged by resumes which selectively depict a person’s education, skills and job experience. That true self is often further camouflaged by the strength of an interviewer’s skills. Avoid these pitfalls by selecting assessment tools that meet the Department of Labor’s guidelines. This is important because you want to be sure the quality of the results actually reflects the job fit of the person you are interviewing, for both the present and the future. Remember, we often hire for perceived job skills and in the end, fire for a poor job fit.

Full Due Diligence requires conducting background checks, real reference checks and collection of other pertinent information. Be sure to have more than one final candidate.When you only have one candidate, you are more likely to rationalize why it won’t make a difference, many times to the detriment of the enterprise. Too often employers select only one and after it’s too late, find out something they hadn’t discovered earlier. The bottom line is … you can pay now to conduct a proper assessment process, or pay later in loss of business, increase in litigation or theft of data, money or proprietary information if you’ve hired the wrong person. You decide.

Join us on Thursday, September 13 @ 9:00 a.m. MDT (11 a.m. EDT/8 a.m. PDT): Hiring Refresher for Busy Bosses.  http://wp.me/pN8WG-97  Find out more about how to effectively use the above-mentioned tools to make better informed hiring decisions.

 “Hiring Amazing Employees” eBook is available at http://BizSavvyHire.com

©Jeannette L. Seibly, 2012