Here at Crawford Thomas Recruiting, sourcing and presenting qualified candidates to our clients is our highest priority.
It is our pleasure to provide guidance during the interview and selection process as well. As I began to write a guide to hire top-level candidates, I was interrupted with an email from LinkedIn’s Talent Blog. Writer: Lou Adler had recently written an article describing his experience with the interview and offer process. While every company has their own way of bringing new people on-board, this step-by-step guide provides in-depth insight from start to finish.
Original article here
12 steps to follow in order to hire high-performing candidates:
- Define the job, not the person, when opening a new requisition. This includes at least one or two major projects, tasks or accomplishments. For each of these, use action verbs (e.g., build, upgrade, design), the deliverable, some measure of success, and the timeframe.
- Build a beginning to end timeline describing the major subtasks required to achieve the major objective. For example, one early one for the controller was, “Conduct an operational audit of the existing reporting and accounting system within 60 days to develop the detailed upgrade plan.”
- Highlight the top 2-3 challenges and tie them to a major project or company initiative. Use a form of this to create the emails you’ll be sending to the best people you find on LinkedIn. Don’t post your internal job descriptions or include any generic boilerplate describing how awesome and perfect your company is.
- After conducting a thorough work history review, ask candidates who are reasonably qualified to describe a major accomplishment most related to the biggest job challenge. Then have the person walk you step-by-step through how they started, managed and completed the project.
- If the process for achieving the accomplishment is comparable to what you need done, do the same thing for all the other accomplishments in subsequent interviews.
- Consider those who have achieved the most comparable accomplishments as hirable. Use a formal Quality of Hire Talent Scorecard to collect the evidence from each interviewer to make this assessment.
- Offer the job to the person who would see the job as a worthy short and long term career move and who is most intrinsically motivated to do the actual work that needs to be done.
- Before making the offer, ask the person if he/she really wants that job ignoring the compensation. If yes, have the person tell you why. If the answer is vague and general, don’t make the offer. A good answer involves the person describing why the job represents a career move, details about the people he/she will be working with, and areas the person finds intrinsically motivating.
- 9. If the person balks at your offer, say, “Don’t make long term career decisions using short term information.” As long as your offer is fair and competitive, the person will accept your offer for the right reasons.
- Before the person starts, make sure you meet him/her at least once or twice to review the challenges of the job and to start the planning process in detail.
- During the onboarding process, review and clarify the performance objectives and timeline in detail so that job expectations are fully understood.
- During the year, manage the person to the timeline.
If you do the above exactly as described, 85% of the people you hire will be great hires.
Article by – Lou Adler
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