The Best Approach To Hiring: Measure Twice, Cut Once

Hiring, as you all know, is crucial to your organization’s success. How crucial? The US Department of Labor estimates that the average cost of a bad hire can be 30 percent of a candidates’ salary, while a good employee can be worth 50 percent more than their annual salary, at least.

That means for an employee with a $50,000 annual salary, the difference between a good employee and a bad employee is $40,000 in the first year alone!

Those numbers do not include the effect those employees have on the rest of your staff. Studies show that productive employees generally make everyone around them more productive, while unproductive employees bring everyone else down with them.

So, clearly, hiring is a crucial decision for any organization. That’s why we strongly recommend a measure twice, cut once approach to it. What exactly does that mean? Well, here are some specifics:

We can’t stress this enough. Don’t just look through resumes and then call in the best five candidates on paper, as this excludes people who might have different experiences but might be a better fit for the job and puts all the emphasis on years in the field. On top of that, prescreening interviews make your in-person interviews so much more effective, as you can really drill in on the areas of strengths or concern you picked up on in the screening interviews. To keep the prescreening interviews as collaborative as possible, we recommend a VoiceGlance interview or something along those lines that allows all members of your hiring team full access to the interview.

Most people do this anyway, as a recent survey shows 91 percent of people look at candidates’ social media pages before hiring someone. The key here is to know what to look for. A 2013 university study showed that people who posted pictures of themselves drinking alcohol on social media were actually were more outgoing than those who didn’t, a good attribute for jobs like sales. Instead, for sales, it is more useful to see how many LinkedIn connections they have, as an example, as a good salesman should have a lot of connections.

The point here is to define the characteristics of the job and see how a candidates’ social media presence fits into that.

No one wants to repost a position and get a new pool of applicants, which can set back your organization for a month or so. But that is a far better option than settling for the wrong candidate, which can have ripple effects for years. So if your original applicant pool isn’t strong and no candidates wow you, repost the job – perhaps on a new board – to get stronger applicants.

Simply put, hiring is too important to get the wrong person.

This is perhaps the most important aspect of all, as a truly committed candidate becomes an employee who is going to stay at your company for some time and will try their best. And a rigorous hiring process helps determine that.

First off, any candidate who is dismayed by a rigorous hiring process or isn’t fully committed to your process clearly isn’t truly committed to your organization already. And secondly, a rigorous hiring process will reveal to you what candidates are truly excited about the position, and what ones just see it as another job.

In conclusion, you are never going to get a perfect candidate, just like you are never going to have a perfect employee. But a measure twice, cut once approach to hiring will allow you to find a qualified, strong candidate who is truly dedicated to the position.