5 Rules For Hiring Great Employees

Learning how to hire well is the single most important thing you can do as a manager.

Selecting the right new hire can dramatically affect your team’s performance, engagement and productivity, yet most managers consistently get hiring wrong.

So what can you do to make sure you always make great hiring decisions?

In this post, we’re going to share five rules for hiring great employees, and we’re going to help you to avoid the one mistake that 99% of managers make every time they hire.

Rule 1: Use A Structured Interview Process

Using structured interviews can help you make sure that your hiring process is fair and consistent, by evaluating all candidates in the same way.

To use a structured interview process, start by clearly defining the job requirements and responsibilities for the role. Then, create a set of interview questions to assess each of those requirements. In advance of the interviews, assign different questions to each interviewer, ensuring that each candidate is asked the same set of questions across all of their interviews.

When designing your process, make sure to incorporate behavioural-based questions that ask candidates about their past experiences and how they handled specific situations. This helps you learn more about their past performance and their future potential.

During the interview, your interviewers should use a scorecard to rate how well candidates answer each question against a consistent rating scale. At the end of the interview process, you can review each interviewer’s scorecard to compare all of the candidates objectively.

Rule 2: Look Beyond The Resume, But Watch Out For Biases

Asking a candidate about their hobbies or interests can be a great way to get to know them better and learn more about them beyond the skills and experience on their resume.

However, it’s important to be mindful of the potential for discrimination or bias. Managers will often let their unconscious biases affect the selection process, or even worse, ask illegal or discriminatory questions about sensitive topics like age, family, or religion.

If you do choose to ask about interests outside of work, make sure to explain why you’re asking and how it’s related to the role. Ask questions that allow the candidate to share as much or as little as they’re comfortable with.

Never pressure people to share personal information if they’re not comfortable doing so.

Rule 3: Hire For Cultural Add, Not Cultural Fit

How many times has someone told you that you should always hire for cultural fit?

This is actually bad advice and one of the most common mistakes that hiring managers make.

Usually when people talk about a good cultural fit, what they really mean is someone they’d enjoy hanging out with outside of work. Often the people we enjoy socialising with have backgrounds that are very similar to our own, so using this kind of criteria means you miss out on great qualified candidates, just because they have a different background to you.

Instead, you should be looking for people that will ADD to your culture, not just fit into it. That means finding candidates who not only align with your company values and are passionate about your organisation’s mission, but that also bring diverse backgrounds and different perspectives or experiences to the team.

Bringing in a new team member is a great chance to introduce new skills and viewpoints, so look for candidates who can contribute to your culture and expand your way of thinking, rather than picking someone who acts and thinks like everyone else that’s already on the team.

Rule 4: Use Practical Assessments and Tests

Including mock projects or assessments in your hiring process are a powerful way to gain deeper insights into a candidates skills and knowledge.

For example, a coding challenge is a great way to assess a programmer’s ability to write clean and efficient code. Similarly, asking a marketing manager to present a marketing campaign for a hypothetical product gives them a way to demonstrate their creativity and expertise. Reviewing the results from these types of hands-on exercises will give you a clearer idea of how someone is likely to perform on the job.

By integrating practical assessments and tests into your selection process, you can make a more informed decision about your candidates and reduce the risk of hiring someone who interviews well, but doesn’t have the depth of skills you need for them to succeed in the role.

Rule 5: Use Data To Evaluate Your Hiring Process

One area that many organisations overlook is the importance of measuring the effectiveness and quality of your hiring process.

It’s impossible to get better at hiring if you can’t tell whether the candidates you selected go on to become successful employees. One simple way to get started is to ask yourself two simple questions after the initial few months that will help you to measure how good your hiring decision was:

1. “Do you regret hiring this person?”
2. “Would you hire them again?”
   

By answering these two questions honestly, you can start gathering valuable data on quality of hire. Other data you can then add to this to give you a more rounded perspective are candidate experience scores, 1st-year performance ratings and early attrition rates.

These data points can all be combined to give you valuable information about the effectiveness of your process and where you need to make improvements.

By following these five rules, you’ll consistently hire great employees every single time.