3 Steps to Hiring With Confidence

1. Narrow Your Search to Top 2 or 3

With your pre-assessment data, your initial interviews, the resumes of your upper tier candidates, and other information you may have gathered, narrow down your list to the top 2 or 3.

This generally isn’t difficult if you have a functional process working for you on the front end. Ruling out candidates in favor of other ones is often a process of elimination. That terrible uncertainty we talked about at the start doesn’t usually show up until the final round. So let’s get to the final round before worrying about it.

If you lack confidence in the earlier rounds of your hiring process, it might be wise to use a professional hiring consultant so you can be sure your final list of candidates is a strong one. To be clear – a hiring consultant differs from a traditional recruiter. We’re not talking about plugging resumes into an automated tool that filters by keywords and college degrees.

The narrowing process should be a highly specialized one that incorporates a sophisticated pre-assessment process as well as other measures that assure you your final list of 2 or 3 candidates will be the strongest it can possibly be.

 

2. Conduct Comprehensive Reference Checks

With your top 2 or 3 choices in hand, now it’s time to see who they really are. You’ve got to get past the “interview show.” You need to get a look at them without any makeup on, behind the stage when they think no one’s watching.

A comprehensive reference check looks something like this:

First, only talk to professional references. Do not call family members, college professors (unless the candidate did actual research – real work – alongside them), or best friends.

Ideally, you want at least two previous supervisors, preferably the owners of the business. Now, if your candidate graduated from college relatively recently, these sorts of references will be a little tougher to come by, but if you’re hiring for top leadership or management positions, or key in-house admin spots, you probably aren’t hiring a fresh grad.

What do you ask these references when you call them?

You want to know about things like performance, work ethic, personality, how well they worked with others, their reliability – all things that never show up on a resume, and are easily overlooked or misconstrued in interviews.

As part of our hiring consultation process, PainLess Hire includes reference checks, which saves you the time and trouble of having to do this step.

 

3. Invite Candidate to a Full or Half Day Job Shadow

This is the most critical step of all. Reference checks give you strong and invaluable insights. But you’re also depending on people who might be really busy at the time, and who knew the candidate in a different context than yours. Chemistry matters. Just throwing together a bunch of superstars doesn’t always mean you’ll win the championship.

So invite these final candidates to spend a full or half-day job shadowing you or the other key employees they’ll be working with.

Now, their true personality will be revealed and known to all. If you want someone who asks a lot of questions, you’ll find out who is more inquisitive and curious in a job shadow. If you need your team to gel relationally, your current employees will be able to report on how that goes.

Fitting into your culture matters more than degrees, skills, or even past accomplishments. The job shadow will reveal who best fits your company culture, in addition to verifying that this person actually knows what they’re talking about.