It’s the beginning of the year and you have all these positions available. Of course, you want to start the year off right and fill these positions with the most qualified candidates on the market. That’s a great goal, but are you aware that you can test-drive your candidates before you hire them?
Evaluating candidates for skills and personality fit is starting to get the attention of hiring managers from all over. Many companies find quick ways to incorporate this into their hiring procedure but are not very efficient. Myers-Briggs personality tests and quick in-person projects test many things that do not necessarily prove if a candidate will be successful. Without dedicating the whole hiring process to evaluating candidates properly, you are setting yourself, the candidate, and potentially the team they will be working with up for failure.
Resumes cannot possibly tell you who a candidate is, what their hopes, dreams are, or, where their life experiences have brought them. You cannot tell the character of the person.
Initial phone screenings cannot tell you any of that either, so what’s left? In person interviews, right?
Hiring from a group of candidates that participate in a project will tell you the most important things about who that candidate is. You can see first hand if they are the kind of person that takes credit for their own work or the contributions of others. You have the ability to see what candidates on any given team do and watch the progress along the way.
Leadership is a skill that is highly sought after. Hiring managers and recruiters want to hire people that know how to properly lead a team, now or in the future. It is one thing when someone says they have led a team, but watching it in action is another. Most of you would take the latter.
Projects and Challenges give hiring managers the ability to watch candidates competing for the same roles behind-the-scenes as they see the communication that goes on between the candidates via email, chatting, etc. If Jimmy with 2 years of experience is looking for that social media manager role, you can see if he outshines Jane who just graduated college but has a great handle with running group projects.
Can the candidate do the job they are applying for?
The greatest goal for any hiring managers is putting the right people in the right roles. You know you got the right person for the job sometimes. It just clicks! Other times, you hope for the best.
In both cases, you don’t really have too many guarantees. Well, what if you can increase your chances of knowing that the person you hired will stick around for awhile, growing and advancing their skill-set and also own their roles and perform really well.
Would you take a chance on that?
Of course, you would! There are never any guarantees in life, but when you need to test for skill sets, do it in a way where the hiring manager and current members of the team you are hiring for can get involved to see if this person really has what it takes to hold their own compared to the seasoned team members.
Challenges can be done in a day or two and can help you to see quickly and effectively who can actually do everything that they say they can.
Culture fit is about hiring people that you want to go out and grab lunch with. Hiring for culture fit is more about finding the people that can acclimate themselves to the team you already worked do hard to set in place, not the other way around.
Do they have the right personality? Will they embrace the vision of the company? Are they passionate about your industry?
Resumes definitely cannot answer these questions, and neither can interviews.
The issue with in-person interviews is that they don’t create conditions for candidates to demonstrate their skill set and personality to their fullest capability. While you may think that you can determine for yourself if the candidate is a right fit, a lot of times hiring managers hire people that fit the bill so to speak but don’t end up working well on the team.
Finding the person that will work seamlessly on a team that is already producing is the greatest accomplishment for anyone looking to hire.
This year, stop wasting time on those resumes and think about what you want out of your teams. Think about how you will grow your team, brand and hire people that work well together and share your company’s goals and vision.
Get started with performance-based hiring and find the candidates you want in 2017!