The Factors We Consider Most Important when Recruiting Employees.
It goes without saying that the most important factor when recruiting is finding and hiring the employees that are most likely to succeed and to stay with you. Thus, the hiring process becomes one of the most important strategy areas of a company’s business plan.
Finding and hiring employees that represent the best fit leads in the long term to stronger performance and staff retention. Whilst considering a new employee, the obvious technical factors and skills are important but generally more broader, ‘intangible’ factors are equally if not more important.
These include things like cultural fit, organisational vision alignment, interests and interest levels.
Ordinary Recruiting
When it comes to recruiting new staff under most ordinary circumstances, companies are looking for employees who will produce the best results in the given position they’re looking to fill. Which means the hiring manager must have a good hiring strategy in place from the start which includes job analysis, so the recruiter or recruiting manager knows what to look for and which skills are most important.
Unsurprisingly, bad hires are expensive to replace, so it’s important to get it right!
Whilst the usual array of hiring tools are useful in ordinary recruiting, such as job boards, university open days, group interviews and classifieds, when it comes to the more specialised roles these sometimes run dry. Quite often, the top hires in an organisation come from direct referrals and networking, to find the most successful people already within the given industry.
Candidate Abilities
Of course, aligning all the facets of a new employee such as abilities, cultural values and interests with your company is vital, they’re equally important. If your new candidate is missing one or more of the three, it’s likely to lead to mutual disappointment.
However, a candidates abilities are very important possibly the most important because if the employee cannot do the job at hand, they will most certainly not succeed. As a result, considering the abilities required, both technical skills and soft skills, is very important. Being clear about these requirements in the job description from the start is paramount.
Technical skills when it comes to a job description are defined as the candidates ability to fulfil the literal work required. For example, if the role is for a chef, the person would need to know how to work a stove!
Soft skills are the other things that are not directly required to complete the work but will be required in managing one’s self within the role. For example, this may be communication skills, level of integrity, problem solving skills. All of which are valued in almost every role.
Lacking or misalignment of any abilities could mean you end up hiring a staff member who cannot do the job.
Organisational Cultural
The organisational cultural fit is important for both employee and employer. The unique culture and style of an organisation is founded on a set of shared values and just a ‘way or doing things’.
If a candidate appears they may not fit with the organisations culture, not only could this produce conflicts for the employer in the future, it’ll also be uncomfortable for the staff member.
Being clear about cultural fit from the start helps companies speed up their time to finding the right employee and minimises the wasted resources in hiring someone who doesn’t work out.
Alignment of Interests
Something that can often happen in recruitment is the hiring manager or recruiting trying to press a candidate into wanting to work for the company. This is not dissimilar to a sales person trying to manipulate a customer into buying from them, the typical outcome is that you get a worker who infact does not want to be working for you.
The extension of this is that these persuaded employees tend to negatively impact the other staff members thus bringing down the entire organisations morale. Something that could have clearly been avoided from the start.
Consider always looking for the top hires, rather than just ordinary recruitment. Leverage JobScouts and get the benefit of referral recruitment using social networks, from the start.
