As 2019 wraps up and we head into the new year, many of us will begin taking stock of what we’ve accomplished in the past year, and even the past few years. As such, I’d like to focus the last few blog posts on how to step into the new year with some positive momentum, starting with how to nail the hiring process.
This week, I’m sharing best practices on the hiring process.
The focus here is on understanding our mindset when it comes to hiring decisions, and improving the entire hiring process so that we find and interview the best people, while removing any kind of bias that might lead us towards making the same hiring mistakes we’ve made in the past.
To help make the process less complicated, here are five articles on how to hire the best person for the job.
1. Be honest with yourself about why you’re not hiring.
This is a short article from Inc., but very important for those of us who need to hire help. The most important statement comes at the end of the article — if you hired someone to do the busy work, are you confident enough in your ability to handle the higher-level tasks? Sometimes we sabotage our best efforts out of fear.
2. Seven ways to improve your hiring process.
While this article from Business News Daily seems simple enough, it includes one point that often gets overlooked — make sure to fit the personality to the job. There are also a number of links to other articles for each tip listed, including how to do a background check.
3. How to hire the best person, not the right person.
This is a pretty thorough article from Software Advice about what it means to hire the best candidate for a job opening. It includes many interview questions and interview scenarios that will help you zero in on the best person to fill your open job posting.
4. Interview questions that will reveal the best candidates.
Here’s a great article from TLNT – Talent Management & HR. It breaks down the interview questions into four specific categories with explanations as to why each category of questions is important to the interview process. It also provides additional links to explain why standard interview questions fail and how to avoid making the same mistakes outlined.
5. How to reduce personal bias when hiring.
This is a great article from Harvard Business Review on what it means to have bias in the interview process, how to avoid falling into the bias trap ourselves, and how to educate ourselves on what bias really looks like. The author, Ruchika Tulshyan, provides many links to books and additional articles, as well as Kristen Pressner’s TEDx talk where she discusses how she dealt with realizing she had a bias against women. It’s quite powerful.
The underlying theme here deals more with self-awareness. The more time we spend figuring out exactly who we are (as a business or a department or a hiring manager), the less time we will spend interviewing people who are wrong for the job. In other words, do as much pre-work as you can to attract the best people.
Christina Holloway is an executive coach and business coach. She helps executives and entrepreneurs grow their companies faster, create results-driven teams, and increase profitability. She has been featured in Forbes, The Huffington Post, Addicted2Success and Fast Company. If you’re interested in working with Christina, take a look at her strategy sessions and contact her to get started.
