The hiring of winners has never been more crucial to a company’s success.  That said the hiring process continues to be poorly handled by many.  Having hired people for over 35 years and being president of a company for 20 years that specializes in personnel search throughout North America , I am convinced that there should be three elements to a successful hire – interviewing, testing and background/reference checking.  This article will give you an overview to each of these and show how they can be integrated to make a final decision. 

First there are exceedingly important decisions that need to take place before the hiring process ever begins.  Factors include whether this position really needs to be filled and if so, does it need to be filled on a part-time basis, full-time basis or can it be outsourced.  Once that determination is made then a job description needs to be developed that all who are involved with the position support.   Desired outcomes should be articulated and quantified as much as possible.  The skills to do it need to be realistic.  Also, the personality of the manager and the culture of the company needs to be understood. 

Assuming you have attracted a pool of candidates, only some appear qualified on paper.  Those need to be interviewed.  Our preference is for multiple interviews where each person is trying to evaluate a different aspect of the person’s qualifications, personality, etc. but all share a common rating form.  Further, each interviewer needs basic training in interviewing and to clearly understand what can and can not be asked of a candidate (consult specific articles to increase your skills as an interviewer and to keep you out of lawsuits).  Questions such as,” tell me about one of your failures and how you handled it”, force the person to discuss areas that they might otherwise try to avoid.  Also bear in mind the position for which you are interviewing.  For a sales position you should expect a very different personality than if you are hiring a bookkeeper who will have no customer involvement.

Secondly, we suggest you test at least your number one candidate.  While there are hundreds of valid tests, our preference is for one that takes less than one hour, can be done on the web, cost less than $200 and gives you the results shortly after the test is taken. 

A success profile needs to be developed in regard to the test results relative to the position.  Obviously the best way to do this is to have the test results on a statistically significant number of your above average performers for the type of position for which you are testing.  However, this can be time consuming and expensive.  There are other statistically valid ways of doing this that are quick and inexpensive.

The final step in the hiring process, aside from negotiating an offer, is to conduct reference and background checks.  There are affordable/reliable/fast services that check such things as: credit, whether or not a person has had DUI’s which can be an indication of alcoholism, academic verification, etc. A release form signed by the candidate is required.  Reference checking on the other hand is much more involved.  First you need to start with people that provide an objective evaluation of the candidate.  Given our litigious society, they are increasingly hard to find.  Generally we find that a list of references that a candidate presents not to be very reliable; would you give someone a name who would give you a bad reference?  Instead you want to find former managers, associates and/or customers of the person that will give you this desired objectivity.  You can hire a service to do reference checking but they should know the industry and have a good reputation.  However, if you are going to conduct the reference check ensure the people you contact of confidentiality and that you are looking for consensus statements versus individual comments.

It is now time to take the results of these three steps; interviewing, testing, and background/reference checking, and compare them to the information you developed that was suggested in the second paragraph of this article.  Generally you will find a consistency which will greatly assist in making a decision, and should result in the hiring of more winners who stay longer than your typical hires.