In part one of this series, we took a look at common traps companies fall into that negatively impact their hiring process. In part two, we'll discuss three key steps companies can take to resolve most of these issues.
Changing the Hiring Game
Despite the potential pitfalls companies face, bad hires don’t have to be a part of the hiring process. Companies can protect themselves by creating transparent, standard hiring policies that weigh a candidate’s cultural fit just as much as their technical competency.
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Creating culture-conscious interview questions
Viruses are roughly one-millionth of an inch in size. Yet they have the power to bring down even the largest and most physically capable of humans. Similarly, a bad hire might be a single person in a much larger company body, but they have the power to cause lasting damage to their department and company outlook.
Companies can avoid long-term issues by creating an evaluation process that considers culture fit. This means creating a list of interview questions that examine candidates for their ideal work environment, as well as being honest about what the company can and cannot offer. Not every great candidate is a good fit because they can meet the technical qualifications of the role. Rather than focus on filling the office with warm bodies, companies need to pick candidates whose long-term goals are aligned with the company’s vision for itself and its team.
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Automating the hiring process
A company’s hiring process shouldn’t resemble a Freemason initiation. A lack of transparency in the hiring process isn’t just bad—it looks bad. Managers and employees want to know their colleagues can be trusted, and they rely on a good hiring process to screen for this. A process that’s vague and secretive plants seeds of distrust and conflict, especially if it’s done without the approval of each affected department.
A clear hiring process means eliminating communication silos between departments. For example, HR should know Marketing wants to hire someone new, and Marketing should expect to vet potential candidates through HR and other relevant managers.
Technology plays an important role in this. Email, Slack, and other unstructured communication platforms do not demand compliance from departments. They allow departments and leaders to bypass or conduct their own hiring processes without submitting their ideas to a checks and balances system. Companies need to structure their hiring process so that managers and departments are required to communicate and comply with the process if they want to create and fill new positions. This can be done through HR-specific software or other centralized platforms that automatically notify relevant persons as a department moves through the hiring process.
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Clear feedback channels
Forget email chains and Slack channels. Hiring is too important (and too costly) to play fast and loose with candidate feedback and observations. It’s imperative to create an airtight communication channel for department and leadership heads to share through. What might be a yellow flag to one interviewer can become a red flag when given context by another interviewer’s notes.
One of the other important parts to consider is the accessibility of those notes for future leadership teams. Post-interview meetups and email chains cannot be recalled by people who weren’t there. Candidate feedback cannot be dependent upon work emails or other channels that are run and controlled by specific office members. It must live on a separate platform and be accessible at any time. Employees, like projects, need a paper trail.
Designing an Effective Hiring Process
Developing an iron-proof hiring process doesn’t require a major technology overhaul. But it does require rethinking your processes with the support of technology. Technology has changed the game for recruiting, and it can do the same for hiring by eliminating communication silos and eliminating individuation in hiring practices.
To learn more about how technology is transforming hiring practices, download our free ebook, How Technologies and Methodologies Are Reshaping HR.
About the Author
Michelle is the Content Marketing Specialist at Kintone. She is a content marketing expert with several years in content marketing. She moved to San Francisco in 2015 and has experience working in small businesses, non-profits, and video production firms. She graduated in 2012 with a dual degree in Film and English.
