Finding the right candidate for any given position is not easy because sometimes, the one who appeared to be the best candidate during an interview isn’t necessarily the best man/woman for the job. So, how is it that the best employers always seem to find the best employees? Well, every company has a process and the most successful companies have the most successful processes.
If you have a business of your own and would like to find the most appropriate candidates for all the positions in the company that need filling, consider a few of the following tried and tested methods.
Be Specific About Your Requirements
The Job Description area is often not detailed, which results in a lot of candidates coming in for interviews who do not really qualify for the job. This can make the whole recruiting process unnecessarily long, as well as stretching the rejection list. To avoid wasting everybody’s time, make sure that your job description covers the following criterions at least.
- Brief details of the actual job in which the candidate will be expected to excel in
- The specific requirements of your company
- The eligibility criterions, including experience requirements
- Preferable and mandatory soft skills
- Expected behavior, code of conduct, etc.
Conduct Interviews with Relevant Personnel by Your Side
It doesn’t matter even if you are the owner; you cannot possibly know everything about everything in your business, which is why you hire skilled people in the first place.
Depending on the specific department and post you are trying to fill, the people accompanying you on the interview should belong to that department or at least be relevant to it somehow. They will be able to better judge whether the expertise of the applicant is good enough for him/her to be useful in the department. You will, of course, still have the final say, but their input is key to finding the right candidate. Let them ask questions relevant to their fields and test the candidate out a bit.
Do Not Underestimate the Incredible Potential of Aptitude Tests
While IQ tests and aptitude tests are similar, they are not the same, but both of them are extremely useful tools to measure a person’s innate and trained mental abilities.
How is that helpful in selecting the right employee for the job, you may ask? Well, for starters, any aptitude test lets you find the most intelligent applicants, which in itself is a bonus. However, employee aptitude tests are a little different and they go much beyond the usual tests, helping the recruiter in identifying the most potential candidates for the exact role that you are trying to fill.
With the help of Success Performance Solutions, you can design employee aptitude tests that are specifically customized to help you find the applicants who are most likely to succeed at the job that you are hiring them to do.
In other words, the customized test will be modeled in such a way that the highest scoring candidates will share traits with some of the most successful and established people in the specific field that you are trying to recruit in.
Not only are customized and specifically tailored aptitude tests by Success Performance Solutions the best way to find suitable new employees, but they can also be used to test out your present workforce and see who is most capable of taking up a higher responsibility.
Introverted applicants often perform poorly in interviews because they freeze or become anxious. While that is not the kind of person you would want to put in charge of PR or direct sales, of course, such personalities can very well be extremely intelligent and capable of performing in places where constant public interaction is not an element.
In all fairness, though, it would be hard to judge how well a person can perform if he/she is choking in an interview and doesn’t yet have any experience to showcase their hidden abilities. An aptitude test is a priceless tool here as it will let you identify the hidden genius, irrespective of his/her personality. In many ways, there is probably no better way than employee aptitude tests to identify and recruit fresh talent.
See How the Applicant Behaves During the Interview
Applicant behavior during the interview/interviews is to be closely monitored and recorded to recognize if the person is suitable for handling the responsibilities that you are hiring them to undertake. While all candidates will behave courteously (or at least they should anyway), as a recruiter, your job is to test them on the following scales and see how they react to each of the scenarios.
- See if they are adaptive by asking questions from various fields, often seemingly unconnected
- Are they able to detect a pattern in those questions, if there was one?
- Do they ask relevant and curious questions as well?
- Present them with a problem related to the job and see if they are able to solve it
- Share a bit of info and test if they really listened by asking questions about what you shared, a bit later
Of course, not all jobs require the candidate to be super communicative and extroverted, but most posts do benefit from such personalities, as long as such traits are also backed up by proper qualifications and the actual ability to do the job in question well enough.
If the Candidate is Experienced, What Does that Experience Reveal to You?
In case you are trying to fill a post that requires experience, it would be fair to expect that most applicants are capable with varying rates of success. Past success is a key factor for obvious reasons, but here are a few others that you should check for in the person’s resume and during the interview.
- How is their history of teamwork?
- While speaking or being asked, do they ever admit to any mistakes they made in the past?
- Has their experience made them more open to learning or has it closed them off?
- Do their accomplishments show a good history of resource management?
- How committed were they to their previous employers?
No business in the world can succeed without superb employees working together and building a road which leads to that success. There will always be an element of luck involved while recruiting and you cannot control that bit, but as long as you maintain everything we just discussed, you will be able to minimize the luck factor and maximize each recruitment.
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