A Manager's Guide To Improving Hiring Skills

Effectively hiring new people or employees is extremely critical to the success of any manager in business. Hiring a negative or unproductive employee will reflect just as poorly on the manager as hiring someone who turns out to be a superstar would reflect positively on this same manager.

Improve Hiring Skills

It depends on the position you currently have, but new people hiring can mean having to review resumes or perhaps interviewing people who come in off the street. Whatever the circumstances there are a few critical items which will help you to be able to sift through all the wrong people while finding the gems which every manager is looking to discover.

Pre-Screen Applicants

It can be extremely helpful if you pre-filter any applicants by requiring a simple drug test and having a background check performed. Most businesses will require a drug-free and non-violent employee. Try to work through your HR department whenever possible because they will be a valuable help with this process.

Whether you are trying to hire a front-line employee or an office executive, there are employment agencies, or temp agencies, which can be an excellent place to start your search. You will have to pay a premium in the beginning, but they will also perform many of the services up front for you, like taking care of the drug testing or background checks. They can also be valuable if things happen to not work out with the employee or you cannot keep your employee motivated, you simply call them on the phone and they will send a new replacement for you.

The Interview

When it comes to hiring interviewing (interviewing potential new-hires), one of the most critical things that you have at your disposal is the knowledge required for the position in which you are trying to hire. Some managers have reached their position in the company by working their way up through lesser positions and they will know everything necessary about each position. If this kind of manager has any interviewing skills whatsoever, they will be able to easily pick the right kind of person for the job that they are trying to fill.

If you will be interviewing people for a position which you do not know much about, the important thing to do is a lot of extensive research. You will need to find out as much as you possibly can about not only the position, but the people who do that kind of job. Try to find out what would make a person good at that particular job.

Compose a list of the qualities that would be most important or that are most necessary for the particular job, then you will know exactly what you should be looking for. It is helpful to enlist the help of someone who currently does that type of work, or who has done it in the past and is familiar with what type of person would be best suited.

Once you have learned as much as you possibly can about the position you need to fill, then you can compose a list of appropriate questions related to that job. This will be useful for many reasons. For one thing, some interviewers get so nervous when interviewing applicants that having this list of questions already set will help them to keep the interview and conversation moving along. Additionally, it helps to ensure that each applicant is answering the same questions which will make it possible to more easily compare the different applicants.

It is a Numbers Game

You will need to interview a lot of people and try to keep notes on each and every one. The only thing you can do to get very good at performing interviews with hopeful applicants is to actually get experience doing a lot of interviews. Then you will gain a feel for the ways an applicant may act and the types of answers you are looking for. You will eventually be able to narrow down the amount of questions you need to ask because you will be able to pick out bad answers immediately, allowing you to cut the interview short if it is going nowhere.

You will need to be very careful about being too quick in deciding about a particular applicant. There will be some point when you get so good at it that you will think that you can pick a good applicant based solely on their hairstyle, clothes or even piercings.

While these may not be protected groups, like gender, race, age, etc, the eclectic nature of today’s workforce might often be quite surprising. There are many hardworking, intelligent, productive people who come in packages that are quite varied these days. You might pass up a superstar if you are not being careful. Pay much more attention to what is in the content of each of their answers, as well as to their demeanor, and less attention to their appearance.

Strong skills in hiring can reflect very positively on any manager and the ability of building a strong team for yourself will make doing your job much easier over the long run.