Evaluate the Match

This is where the manager most effectively spends their time – not qualifying candidates or seeing people who they should never hire. Having identified the three to five candidates that match your requirements, the evaluation process is essential and this is the most important step.

Assessments and hiring tools are an essential tool, but the face to face interview is paramount in making the right decision as chemistry is essential.

The problem is that for most people the interview process is minimally effective at best. The solution lies in building a better process and effectively checking information   

Develop Better Interview Questions

Rather than simply going through the basic questions around their resume and the job you are filling, ask open-ended questions that will enable you to identify whether they are indeed the right match.

If you use the Selection Edge process, the benchmark will give you many of those questions and we will also work with you to make your interview process more effective.     

Create a System where you see Candidates Three Times

You may like a candidate on the first interview and then wonder what you saw in them when you next see them. The third interview can be even more telling and you have to put together a process that allows you to get to the third interview without feeling that you are simply rehashing information….and wasting your time.

The key accountabilities statement is valuable here as it will enable you to stratify your interview process along the following lines:

• First Interview – Resume based
• Second Interview – Open ended questions from the job benchmark
• Third Interview – Specific questions around key accountabilities

 Check References

There are three main reasons why we don’t check references:

• Nobody will give a bad reference…so why check?
• I trust my instincts and checking will reveal nothing further
• If I spend time checking, the candidate will take another job

The bigger problem is that if the person making the hiring decision checks the references they will do a lousy job. They already know that they want to make the hire and instead of looking for any potentially bad information, they are really looking to validate their hiring decision.

Imagine how powerful it would be if you could outsource that activity to a professional. Someone who is not emotionally involved in the decision and who knows the techniques to use to get from the reference given to other co-workers at previous jobs that the candidate has not, for whatever reason, chosen to give.             

Edge offers this reference checking service on a very reasonable fixed fee per applicant basis.

Background Checks

When you hire somebody you are making a significant investment. In most other areas of life, you would undertake significant due diligence before making that kind of investment, but when it comes to people you are prepared to roll the dice.

Background checks that cover criminal and financial are inexpensive, but what they can save you is enormous:

• People close to your money who have financial problems
• People perpetually involved in harassment lawsuits
• People with criminal records

The point here is not that those are, in themselves, reasons not to hire people, but that if people have not disclosed them and you uncover them, then that is an important piece of information.    

The most usual reason why people in the hiring process fail to take this step is because they don’t want to lose the new employee while they wait for the results and worry that they will have a problem if person starts and they subsequently got troubling results.