Seven Steps to Hiring the Right Person

Seeing clearly and digging deeper helps you find the best talent

Today, managers and interview teams rarely receive best-practice training for how to hire for optimal results. Organizations often avoid hiring and interview training because it is a complex process. Providing more than anecdotal best-practice evidence and reinforcing learning through post-training exercises can be time consuming. Instead, most of us learn how to hire by watching others, and adopt less-than-ideal habits and practices. One of the worst habits? Jumping right in before doing your homework

Here are seven steps to improve your odds of finding the best fit:

Step 1—Understand your culture.

Take objective stock of your organization’s culture, focusing on: communication, collaboration, openness, maturity, innovation, cohesiveness, mission, values, diversity and supportiveness. You may want to engage other leaders and HR to help with this evaluation—this is good information for everyone to have and use.

Step 2 — Understand your team dynamic.

Use the characteristics above to evaluate your own team. What tone have you set? What team personality has developed? This is not an exercise intended to judge or change things, simply to understand. The better you can define your environment, the more success you'll have recognizing the candidate who will best fit, adapt to and complement your team.

Step 3 — Clarify your real needs.

Spend time defining the role you need filled. It’s difficult to hire the right person if your needs are unclear and responsibilities are hazy. Resist the temptation to duplicate the same job description. Be willing to evaluate the role, its impact and true gaps that exist on the team. Coupled with perspective on your organizational and team culture, you can accurately describe the day-to-day role, challenges, opportunities, environment and skills requirements. In turn, attracting more applicants who are qualified and enthusiastic about the position.

Be willing to analytically evaluate the role, its impact and true gaps that exist on the team or within the department

Step 4 — Cast a targeted net, not a bigger one.

Bigger isn’t always better, and resume volume can be more trouble than it’s worth. Since job boards and talent acquisition tools come onto the market daily, you’re no longer limited to a few tools. Reach your audience by using industry-specific and focused sites—with a little research, you’ll find the best “pond” to fish in. Even better, you may be your own best resource. Those oh-so coveted passive job seekers are out there, waiting to hear from you on LinkedIn. How about your alma mater… does it have an alumni career site? You may receive fewer resumes, but they’ll be more targeted and relevant.

Step 5 — Read between the lines.

Once you’ve qualified candidates’ skills, look beyond keywords, degrees and school rankings. The more telling information is in the resume’s content and structure. Look at consistency, accuracy and flow of information (or the lack of these things) because they are telltale signs of how the applicant communicates, thinks, prioritizes value and draws conclusions. Being mindful that a resume is simply a piece of paper, if your applicants can’t convince you on paper that they can be clear-thinking, organized and succinct contributors who bring quantifiable successes to the table, they’re probably not the best candidate.

Step 6 — Dive deeper when assessing your candidates.

You likely have 3-4 questions you’ll ask all candidates during an interview. And, if we’re being honest, you may frequently make up your mind within the first few minutes. The truth is, it’s tough to critically evaluate people without taking the time to get to know them. That’s why techniques, such as “behavioral interviewing” that explores the way candidates think and provides deeper insight into their personalities, can improve your likelihood of success.

Whether you take advantage of these methods or not, it is critical to: 1) incorporate questions that get candidates talking about how they approach their work and 2) be consistent by measuring every candidate with the same set of questions. You can also gauge a candidate’s technical expertise by using function-specific testing in any number of areas.

Step 7 — Value “will” over skill and “substance” over form.

It’s easy to become focused on hiring someone with exactly the right skillset so they can “hit the ground running” because you needed this position filled “yesterday.” Yes, you need someone with the core skills to perform the job, but try to use a long view and make exceptions for exceptional people. Skills can be learned, developed and improved.

While eagerness, desire, motivation, adaptability, commitment… well, people either have these traits or they don’t. And if they don’t, all the skill in the world won’t make them a high performer. And the goodwill you create by giving people a chance to prove themselves usually pays off. Don’t get drawn in by glitz. If a candidate who has an impressive presence and tosses out all the right buzzwords and can’t back it up with grounded examples, he or she may be accustomed to cruising on charisma and not have the goods to actually deliver.

If a candidate who has an impressive presence can’t back it up with grounded examples, he or she may not have the goods to deliver.

Clearly, navigating the hiring process successfully is challenging on multiple levels, and the results can have significant impacts. If you take the time to understand your culture and needs, look in the right places and use smart techniques to get to know them, you will vastly improve your chances of hiring the right person the first time.

Let’s continue this conversation! Join me May 2 for a peer discussion among nonprofit leaders on rethinking talent and total rewards. Learn more.