1. How Fast Do You Want the Candidate?
How many times can you count on one hand that there is an "immediate need" for a candidate, but it seems that hiring managers are sitting on their hands, twiddling their thumbs in lieu of staging interviews? This could be a misinterpretation to your candidates indirectly showing them that you and your company are not interested in them, coaxing them to possibly take another offer elsewhere. Be clear and concise with you recruiters if you have planned a vacation, sick leave or if you are just plain unavailable so they can re-evaluate the best time to bring in a potential hire.
2. Is Your Gut Really Correct?
It's widely thought by many hiring managers that they are absolute of who they want to hire within 5 minutes of meeting with a candidate. I have actually been told this in past interviews, personally. These are for the most part biased, subconscious feelings and can actually overlook good candidates in favor of a candidate that closely resembles what the hiring manager sees as a greatly packaged product. This can be labeled as "Mirror-Image Hiring" and can be very detrimental to an organization as it can lead to a stagnant state or a plethora of brown-nosers. Nobody likes a brown-noser; sniffing too hard could be hazardous to your integrity. Step outside of your comfort zone to take a look at more skilled candidates that will possibly bring great challenge and promise to your company.
3. How Important are the Candidate's Skills?
There have been studies to back the notion that managers will hire for cultural preferences rather than for the candidate's raw talent. Not always the greatest way to go about this method of hiring. Try locating an assessment evaluation, which can be found online and it is automatically scored with easy-to-read/understand results, giving you a better outlook on your candidates.
4. Behavioral Assessments: Yes or No?
If anyone of us has been in an interview (and we all have), dependant upon the hiring company, they will give out behavioral assessment tests. Time consuming, sometimes redundant, but these are fairly valuable to the hiring managers. Not just to see who will take the time to complete these tedious pieces of work, but it will provide you with a much better understanding of you candidates. These also can provide lenghty and and in-depth interview questions to dig deeper into the candidate's behavioral aspects. If you're a 3-minute decision-making hiring manager; you may want to try this out.
5. Are You an Early Adopter?
Video interviewing will become the norm in the next few years as it helps reduce travel costs associated with flying in candidates, eliminates the scheduling hassles associated with phone screening. and proves its value as a more revealing tool when trying to determine who is worth bringing in for the face-to-face interview. The question may be: What are you waiting for? Do you fear process change or new technologies? Are you getting or giving push back when you are approached with new technologies that could make your hiring process easier? Are you still holding on to your rotary phone?
6. Are You Compliant?
Despite who your gut tells you to hire, you are required by law not to discriminate against protected classes such as race, gender, and age. If your gut for instance is always telling you your candidate is too old, too black, or too feminine, then you may run the risk of non-compliance with a cute-little band of fellows called federal entities such as the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Drawing their ire could bring fines, not to mention bad press and lower employee satisfaction, "YIKES!". As mentioned earlier you must step outside your comfort zone when hiring and employing a diverse workforce is a great way to do this.
7. Will Everyone But You Get Blamed for the Bad Hire?
Simplified answer; NOPE! You as the hiring manager will be partly to blame as well, not just the HR/recruiting segment of the workplace. HR cannot fully understand all the nuances, complexities, and skill requirements of each department. The hiring manager must be involved in the hiring process from start to finish ensuring they are getting the candidates that best match the skills and behavioral attributes necessary for the job. This way time is not wasted unnecessarily.
So, are you ready to hire some candidates?!
