Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels
Being the leader of a business organization, you know for certain you won’t get far without having skillful employees in the workforce. However, skills and experience are part of the equation for choosing the right talents. It also involves knowing whether a candidate is capable of applying these skills in your company and has a positive work ethic to boot.
Managers and executives need to hire based on merits but without focusing on reliability, they may end up hiring people who won’t stay in the long run. With this in mind, you need to make sure you’re recruiting individuals you can rely on. These are people who are willing to advance professionally and bring innovation to the company. To find and onboard these kinds of people, consider these essential tips:
1. Profile the right candidate
A successful recruitment campaign starts with profiling. Since reliability is the main focus here, you need to know what skills and attitudes a reliable employee must possess. Apart from writing a job description specific to the vacant role, include traits that align with your corporate culture. These may include an ability to creatively collaborate on new ideas or independently deal with complex tasks with limited supervision. These attributes can help your recruitment team to narrow down the selection process to a few strong applicants.
2. Make the most out of a job interview
When you’re hiring people who are intellectually and morally adept, your job interview shouldn’t focus solely on a few basic questions, most of which can be answered by an applicant’s resume. Instead, a well-structured interview session should reveal a lot more about the applicant than what is already stated in their resume.
Situational questions are crucial to this. If you’re hiring for a technical role such as cybersecurity, have the applicant walk you through the process of fixing a data breach or improving access controls. In terms of work ethic, ask the applicant what they would do when they encounter difficult personalities. These open-ended questions provide you with more insight into knowing if a candidate would fit right in.
3. Conduct thorough background checks
There’s much you will need to know about a candidate that a psychological assessment and a job interview won’t show. You wouldn’t know for sure if they are who they say they are, so it’s crucial to do a deep dive into their background, starting with their criminal record.
You can use a service like Triton Canada to examine a candidate’s criminal record and protect your company’s reputation. You will also need to require the candidate to submit a list of character references, especially from their previous employer. When speaking to references, ask why the candidate resigned and if the candidate had been sanctioned for violating company policies.
4. Evaluate during the training and probationary period
Once you have onboarded the candidate, they must undergo a training period where they will be taught company policies and the technical aspects of their role. An assessment of their work ethic would be more accurate when you’re recruiting in batches. Observe how they interact with their fellow trainees and see how other trainees perceive them.
You may want to provide them with tasks they can handle individually and as a group to evaluate their performance better. During the three-month probation period, consider checking how they get along with tenured employees, navigate the tasks given to them, and submit their deliverables before a set deadline.
Endnote
When you hire the best talents, you need to look for and onboard individuals you can lean on. Beyond the right skills, these people may bring a high level of commitment to the work that’s waiting for them.