Recruiting for SUCCESS

Nik MacMillan

​If you are trying to avoid having to deal with performance issues or misconduct, the best place to start with hiring the right people. Getting the right person for your team is about more than previous experience and qualifications, you need to ensure that they can work with the others in your team and have the right potential.
Thanks to the way modern recruitment work it can be hard to get a really good idea of what someone is like on a day to day basis.  First off, you get their application electronically, then you may use a recruitment management system to screen their application based on some criteria such as a visa status, years of experience or qualification.  Once you have done that you will look at the CV and maybe the covering letter and might call a few of the most promising applicants.  If you are lucky you will catch them off guard and get a glimpse into their real personality but most times you will see the public persona crafted for being a candidate. Then you will invite them to interview with you and you will ask the same questions as everyone else, the candidate will probably give you the answers that you expect to hear. Then you will call their references that have been carefully handpicked by the applicant and may not even be their direct manager or even someone they ever worked with!
Then they start their new role with you and you are left wondering why they are nothing like the person you saw at the interview! What a time-consuming waste!
But all is not lost … there are ways to make sure that your recruitment process produce better results.  I have recruited hundreds of roles from all organisational levels and hired a few of my own duds so have some experience to draw on.  Here are my top tips for making your process more robust:

1. Make sure that your advertisement is honest and factual – don’t make promises that you can’t keep.  In one organisation I worked in they insisted on describing their work environment as funky and fun – it was in fact one of the dullest places I had ever worked.  They struggled to keep the people they hired because they had unmet expectations right off the bat.
2. Only screen CV’s on things that are relevant.  You may only like applicants that have perfect spelling and grammar, but if they are going to be doing a labouring job this is not relevant!
3. Have an application form that asks about their visa status, medical history and work history. This means that you have that information about them before you interview them. If you work in an industry where you use balloons for promotions, having someone that is allergic to latex will probably not work well.
4. Use behavioural questions in your interviews – things like “Tell me about a time …” Describe a situation ….”, and “Tell me how you have …”.  All these questions force the candidate to come up with an example of their previous behaviour, and this is a good predictor of future behaviour.  
5. Insist on speaking to their most recent or current manager as a verbal referee before any offers are finalised. 
6. Try not to call a mobile number for a reference – phone the main office of the company they work for and ask to speak the referee.  This ensures that at least you are speaking to someone that works there and not a friend or family member.

While these tips will not 100% guarantee the perfect person, they will help in giving you better information to make a decision with.  My last rule for recruitment is “If in doubt, say No thanks”. 

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