5. Train the hiring managers (if you’re not the one hiring)

Once you know what type of person you want and the skills needed to overcome the problems you face, you are halfway to recruiting staff to make your team more successful.

If you are in a larger business with more than one management layer, make sure you communicate to all hiring managers the value and behaviour requirements that all candidates should demonstrate.

What steps are you going to put in place to get hiring consistency across your business? Some ideas include:

• Write down the values and behaviours and the create a training session that all hiring managers need to attend
• Create a values and behaviour based interview undertaken by a small group of senior managers at the end of the process
• Build a specific personality assessment or test into your hiring process

Don’t take for granted the importance of training all hiring managers about what is needed and why it is needed. Put in place training to cement these requirements into the hiring process.

6. Get team members involved in recruiting staff

I always found it useful to get the team members involved in the recruiting process for several reasons:

Firstly, getting team members’ view helped

1. to give me a different point of view which might confirm or challenge my thinking on a given candidate.
2. to spot behaviours or points that I had missed, or the candidate had kept from me
3. to get the team’s input into the hiring decision and therefore greater buy-in to the person. After all, they have to work the new joiner too.

Candidates can often be a lot more off guard in an informal setting when they are meeting their future colleagues rather than their future boss.  Creating this setting can reveal quite a lot about each candidate which is very useful in the recruiting process.

Use the feedback you receive. I usually do this in a group setting so that everyone involved in the process can give feedback and then you can make a decision to hire – or not – in the meeting or following the meeting.

Involving multiple people in the hiring process helps get a balanced view of each candidate and I think generally leads to better staff recruitment decisions, better team buy in and results in a better more effective team

Lastly, while the tradition interview process is time efficient for the hiring company, once a candidate develops strong CV writing and interviewing skills, it can be much harder to work out if that person will work out well in practice. So I have an alternative approach to put forward which is a lot harder to game.

7. Audition rather than Interview to recruit staff

During an interview process you are asking the candidate to describe how they would approach a given situation or solve a given problem. They can provide real examples or make them up. 85% of people apparently lie on their CVs per Hire Right. One assumes answers given in interview are not always accurate and the interviewer will only pick up on so many of the inaccurate answers.

So rather than getting the person to tell you what they have done, get them to show you or demonstrate their skills. This approach is much harder to game and gives you a better assessment of their skills and ability to solve your problems. Hence audition rather than interview.

We suggest trying to build the audition around a mini project that the person can do in your offices over a period of half a day or longer.

Let me give you an example of how to set these exercises up:

Invite the candidate into your offices and explain that you would like them to undertake a mini-project while at your offices. Tell them they can speak to anyone in the office and ask for any information needed (work out what is okay to share first).

The output could be a presentation outlining their findings and conclusions.

The project could be:

• creating an outline marketing campaign via email, social media etc, including indications or even into the detail on content, timing and audience and their testing process etc
• Restructuring a team to respond to changing needs of the business
• Creating analysis on a set of customers with recommendations on how to proceed to increase sales or increase profit of the customer group.

Create a project with an output that would help you solve or start to solve a live problem or a recent problem which is not in public domain.

This approach gives you a real insight into:

• How they approach work
• Their problem solving skills within your team environment
• How they interact with your team, their working style, their ability to form productive relationships, their likeability etc
• How they work under pressure
• The quality of their output is versus other candidates

And a whole host of other benefits.

It also gives the candidate the ability to actually work in the offices and meet a lot of the people they might be working with and get a feel of the style of how the company operates. This improves retention rates.

The downside is auditioning usually requires more time from the candidate and your team overall.

Auditioning provides a lot more insights into the person and their abilities than interviews. Setting up the mini-project carefully is important and freeing up team members to help candidate are both important. 

Think how you could use this approach in your hiring processes.

The staff that you recruit into your business will help make or break your business. Your team are incredibly important to get right whether you are 4 people in the business or 400 or 4,000.