Grade the Candidates

One of the worst aspects of hiring is having to interview candidates. Managers find that this is the most intimidating and time-consuming area, and they waste hours of valuable management time seeing inappropriate candidates.

The saddest part of the whole exercise is that they often end up simply hiring the least inappropriate candidate – the Tallest Pygmy – just because they can’t find what they want, but need somebody to make up the numbers.

To avoid this, you need to set up a process to have other people handle the tasks that you intuitively want to handle yourself. 

Be Clear About Your Requirements

Create a screening tool that sets out your core requirements. Edge has a document that we use in our process. If you create your own, it should include such things as required work experience, specific experience, preferred industries and acceptable distance to travel.

It varies by industry, company and job, but it is something that can be relatively easily developed. The payoff is that you don’t have to do it all yourself.

Screen Applicants

Only see applicants that meet your requirements. If you use a benchmark, you can be very disciplined about matching the applicant to the job. 
  
While the hiring process described here does not require that you have somebody else screen the applicants for you it is something that you might want to consider.

Edge has professional telephone screeners who screen all applicants before you ever see anybody. This offers the following benefits:

• Eliminates administrative time to set up the interview
• Cuts down on executive time spent interviewing
• Minimizes disruption to the office
• Increased secrecy

Match to the Benchmark

Having created the Benchmark, you clearly want to match candidates to your requirements. The way to do this is to run reports that match the behaviors, values and core competencies of the applicants to what you identified you wanted.

You can do this before you see applicants or after you interview them and only run them on people that you like. The problem is that if they don’t match the benchmark and you decide to reject them, then you have wasted management time seeing them – time that could have been easily avoided….and spent more profitably elsewhere.