As your business grows, it will become more important than ever to build a scalable hiring practice to go along with it. If you don’t, you could cost your company thousands of dollars on bad hires, poor fits, or wasted training. Here are some steps necessary to build a sustainable hiring system.
Identify Your Core Brand
To start hiring within a sustainable system, you need a strong company culture and powerful core values. These values will be present with you throughout your hiring process. Keep them in mind when implementing your strategy. For example, If innovation is one of your core tenants, then make sure to pursue hiring creative types.
Begin Your Hiring Plan
A hiring plan should answer some of the following questions:
- How do we fulfill our company goals?
- Do we have enough employees to reach these goals?
- If not, when do we need to hire the people to fill these positions?
- What is the budget for these new hires?
- What skills are we lacking to fulfill our goals?
Once you answer these questions, begin to work towards filling these gaps within your company.
Be Aware Of Your Timeline
When performing your plan, be aware about how fast you would like to onboard these new hires. If you are growing quickly, you might need to skip some steps or shorten the process so that you can get the people that you need. On the other hand, if you may have a slower growth cycle and therefore can afford to have a more drawn out recruiting process. One thing we advise not to skip is performing an online background check.
Refine Your Interview
Interviews are the best ways to vette your candidates. Because of this, they need to be implemented well. Some things to focus on when creating good interview policy:
- Create a positive interview experience – Unless you have a high stress work environment, making your interviews high stress experiences benefit no one. You might scare away the very people you are trying to recruit with the wrong impression of your company
- Try to get your candidate to drop their guard – This is a good way to see your candidate’s real self, which is what will most likely shine through when they have been on the job a few months and are more comfortable. This is who you need to decide to hire, not the fake persona that a candidate creates for an interview
- Focus on culture and fit – How well does this candidate mesh with your hiring team/other employees. Will they fit in your company?
- Ask baseline questions – Asking some baseline questions throughout each interview is a good way to stay consistent. Keep a record of answers to these questions, as you may find some trends. If great hire answers one way, future applicants who answer similarly might have similar dispositions.
Have Great Training
Training is the next step in building a sustainable hiring practice. After the hire, it is no longer the employee’s fault whether they succeed or fail, it is now on your company. Make sure that your new employees are trained in a consistent manner with little to now confusion in what their next steps are in the company. Ambiguity leads to bad habits in new employees which are hard to break.
Iterate And Refine
After you have made several hires and trained them, follow up on the process. With a critical eye, observe any weaknesses in your new employees, hiring process, or training system. Use that feedback to refine your hiring and training process so the next group of employees will be even more successful. For instance, are you or your employees poor interviewers? You might want to consider coaching to get better at it. Are your new hires taking too long to adapt to your company culture? You might want to take a look at your onboarding process.
By taking these tips to heart, you can make a great sustainable hiring process, one which will be easily scalable, no matter how large your company ends up getting.
