Hire the Right Way

Hire the Right Way

The clock is ticking. Your boss needs a decision by next week.

You’ve narrowed your choices down to five candidates. Five really good candidates. But, you don’t want a good hire, you want to great one.

As the deadline for a hiring decision looms closer, the pressure makes you more susceptible to hiring mistakes.

“What if they don’t work well with the team?”

“How can I be sure about their work ethic?”

“What happens if they leave after six months?”

Thoughts of doubt enter your mind and you make the decision to pull the trigger on someone you are unsure about, just to meet the deadline.

While this situation can have an unhappy ending, edOpp Solutions believes that it doesn’t have to be that way. We know that there is a better way to hire, one that goes beyond finding a “good fit”. Hiring isn’t just about matching job descriptions and resumes anymore, it’s about balancing the hard skills and soft skills of the candidate. Finding that balance can be achieved by getting to know the candidate through interviews and identifying their overall “employability skills”.

Talk to the Person NOT Their Profile

Questions about date verification and qualifying hard skills are valuable but can be done pre-interview. Don’t ask questions that can be answered by looking at their resume, ask questions that help inform you about this candidate, far beyond what one sheet of paper can. How can you do that? I’m so glad you asked, because I was going to tell you anyway.

When you or the company posted the original job opening, it should have included an initial screening process, if not, consider using one going forward. This screening identifies candidates that match certain hard-skill requirements such as proficiency in certain language(s), degrees/certifications, or computer skill level, and soft-skill requirements such as leadership traits, communication, or cognitive/emotional empathy. What these screenings won’t do, is analyze a candidate’s employability skills.

What exactly are employability skills? They can be categorized as an applicational blend between hard and soft skills like, problem solving abilities, self-awareness, or learning capabilities. But imagine trying to create a question that garners those type of answers... It is easier than you think!

Create behavioral and situational questions that evoke an organic response that requires the foundational hard skills but relies on the personal soft skills of the individual. Role-specific interview questions are great at evaluating employability skills because they often deal with situations that actually happen at work, which require the finesse of hard and soft skills.

Hiring the Right Fit

During the interview process, you can focus on the end goal: building a high-performance team. In order to do that, you must shift from the mind set of filling open positions monotonously to analyzing the type of employees needed to achieve hiring goals. 

Do you know the personality, qualities, and attitude that will be the right fit for your culture?

If so, then what questions can you ask to detect these traits? You need to have these questions ready because it is your job to determine which response indicates an alignment with your company’s goals. This is a great way to conceptualize what are normally, abstract qualities. You can now hire with confidence, knowing that when you pull the trigger, you will hit a bullseye.

If you are up for the challenge, edOpp is here to support you. Join our campaign and became part of a movement that shows you how to rethink the way you hire people.