Guest Post: By Omer Tadjer

HR departments know that hiring the right person for the job is crucial for companies. In fact, the right person for the job can mean a bump in revenue equivalent to 10 times up to 100 times that employee’s salary. So it is vitally important to find the right person for both the company and the job that needs to be filled. Structuring the hiring workflow will help companies find that right person.  Here are some things to keep in mind.

Think Online in a Big Way

Companies that are successful in recruiting the right type of candidates have their very own careers website that enables them to foster and grow potential candidates for job openings. It’s not enough to have a website for the business any longer; successful HR departments have a dedicated recruiting website. In the careers website, companies provide insights into the corporate culture and what it is like to work for them. They successfully tailor job applications for each position they’re looking to fill, and they provide complete anonymity to those visiting the site since many job seekers are often employed.

Social Networking, HR Style

Nearly two thirds of adults use some form of social media. That is why corporations allow reposting jobs with share buttons for social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, and others. By allowing simple, easy ways to promote and search for jobs, it makes it more likely that the right candidate will see the position.

Screen Your Candidate

It is vital to screen candidates as efficiently as possible because upwards of 50 percent of candidates are not typically even qualified for the position. By using efficient screening techniques and programs, companies can effectively weed out unqualified candidates from potential employees.

What is important at this stage is to have everything automated, to provide enough feedback to the candidates so that they know that their applications have been received, and that they have a positive experience with the company, regardless of whether they are hired for the current position or not. By keeping candidates’ resumes on file and keeping them within the company’s knowledge base, when there is a need for candidates with their particular skill sets, Human Resources can act on that need quickly and decisively.

Using software at this stage to screen resumes will cut down on wasting valuable staff time and money, sifting through each potential candidate. By having the appropriate manager and staff receive the screened resumes and interview potential clients will reduce the amount of hours HR needs to spend with each potential candidate.

Preparing Multiple Interviewers

Once the HR team has their list of potential candidates, the next step is to prepare the interviewers so that they ask pertinent questions. Without focus, a multiple interview may be little more than a chat session with a potential employee with no real substantive information gleaned from the prospect.

By now, HR should have a list of requirements that the department needs in an employee. If the department has not come up with a list of very important qualities and skills they need in a candidate, they need to create a list now. There are undoubtedly “must haves” and “would like to have” qualities and skills that their candidate needs. This list will form the basis of interview questions. All the interview questions can form part of a question bank that interviewers can and should use when interviewing the prospective employee.

Questions should focus on the potential employee’s background and education, as well as any particular skill sets he or she might have learned. Other questions that need to be included are brainstorming questions, which gives insight into the candidate’s overall experience and knowledge. Brainstorming questions are more hypothetical and more open-ended, such as asking how the potential employee would go about solving a problem. Another question that should be asked is how the candidate would react to specific difficulties that might arise in that particular job. By seeing how the interviewee reacts to the questions and how he or she may answer them, may give the interviewers an idea whether the candidate will fit into that particular position.

The questions formulated should be neutral, that is, not leading to the answer that the employer wishes to hear. For example, if the company is looking for a system administrator who might be called to do fieldwork, a good question would be: “How much work were you able to accomplish at customer locations?” Rather than: “Would you be able to go out to customer sites about half the time?”

Vet Candidates With a Candidate Evaluation

It is important to implement a formal evaluation process when interviewing. This provides interviewers with the ability to provide feedback that recruiters and hiring team managers can easily access.  Have the interviewers take notes and use a evaluation sheet – or scorecard –  to give a more complete evaluation of the candidate. Candidate evaluations are helpful because they will prompt interviewers into looking at certain aspects of the potential employee that they may not have thought about if they had not brought the evaluation sheet along. When the interview process is complete, all the positive and negative evaluations are summed up in a rank of some sort that can be used to determine whether to hire the potential candidate, or continue to look for someone else.

Work As A Team

Regardless of what position needs to be filled, it’s important for all interviewers to work as a team.

Hiring the right person will make everyone’s job go much smoother. Hiring the wrong person can be a disaster. Utilizing technology, including new tracking systems that will help with the interview process will also help keep all the interviewers on the same page when it comes to asking the right questions. That way, the company can hire the very best people for the job.

About Omer

Omer Tadjer is the CEO and co-founder of Comeet, a collaborative recruiting company that provides innovative software that transforms the way companies hire new employees. Omer has been involved in high-tech companies for more than 15 years, a decade of which was devoted to software development and managing development teams. A technologist (and philosopher) by training, he is a business entrepreneur at heart. Omer is passionate about applying his practical IT and management experience to creating valuable products and transforming the way the HR industry operates. Prior to Comeet, Omer founded and ran Etgar, a company providing professional and IT services to global clients. In his spare time, Omer managed the Revolution Orchestra, a 30-player orchestra based in Tel Aviv.

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