The job market is a frantic arena. It’s simply not enough for employers to sit back and let prospective candidates do all the running. Engaging the best candidate for your vacancy is a two-way street and you need to invest the time to get it right. Follow these seven steps to optimize your chance of successfully hiring the best candidate, every time.
Pitch it right: Before you go to press with anything, review your job description, person specification and advert text. Make sure they are an accurate reflection of the role you are advertising and make sure they are written with professionalism and accuracy. A badly written job ad could lose you your best candidates before you’ve even started. And don’t forget to sell — the company, the role and the benefits. Make the opportunity irresistible. You will always be better off with more applicants to review, than less.
Be competitive: Stay in touch with your local labor market and ensure you are competitive with salary, bonus and the overall package of benefits. Research what your competitors are offering and find ways to make your overall offering more attractive than theirs. Your budget may be limited, so you may need to get creative, but if you allow yourself to fall too far behind the competition, the best candidates will naturally gravitate toward them instead of you.
Set the bar: Be clear on your expectations, in terms of skills, competencies, qualifications and experience. What is really needed? If something isn’t a prerequisite, don’t list it on your specifications as essential. Conversely, if there are specific skills or qualifications that are a must, make this clear up front and don’t settle for less. If you’re not clear with your advertisement, you’ll waste a lot of time reviewing, or even interviewing, unsuitable applicants.
Test the water: Make sure you deploy a variety of methods to test candidates’ aptitude for the job, but make sure they are relevant to the role. Don’t test someone’s typing speed if they’ll never have to sit behind a desk in their job. Engage your local HR or recruitment team if you need assistance dreaming up suitable test mechanisms or scenarios. Be cautious about allowing any remote testing, such as those that can be done online from candidates’ homes. These are too easily completed by someone other than the applicant and therefore open to abuse.
Tailor questions: You may have clearly defined competencies in your job description, but try to avoid simply lifting questions from a textbook into your interview template. You have to ensure that you are testing the competencies and qualities that you stipulated you needed, but you need to encourage answers that will allow you to understand the candidate’s capability in the context of the job they are applying for. Make sure you’re asking the right questions.
Listen to your gut: Many companies have policies and procedures around recruitment and selection that can be prescriptive, often leaving you feeling your hands are tied. However, don’t be afraid to listen to your instinct. People act in their own self-interest at interviews, and unfortunately some will be economic with the truth if they think it will serve them better. Probe candidates as much as you need to in order to either confirm or allay any doubts you might have about their suitability.
Business ‘fit’: Never forget that a candidate is assessing you and your business as a potential employer as much as you are assessing them as a prospective employee. Explain to them what a typical day looks like, take them for a tour of the workplace and allow them to ask questions of you. Both you and the candidate need to be sure that this opportunity is the right fit for them. An applicant may tick all the boxes for skills, competencies and qualifications, but still be the wrong “fit” for your company’s environment.
Follow these seven steps and you can be confident that you will recruit the right person for the right job. You’ll dramatically reduce the risk of ending up with a person without the right credentials, or someone who, after starting employment, discovers they just don’t like the job or the culture of the organization. Ultimately, the result over time will be consistently better quality hires, happy employees and a diminishing attrition rate.
At SCR, we know providing Quality People equals Quality Projects. We can help you find the experienced, innovative energy sector talent you need to complete your next project on time, and on budget. Contact us today!
