In my thirty years of experience as a management consultant, what is the biggest issue I have found with regard to hiring new staff?
In speaking with hundreds of business professionals over the years, I’ve found they have no real tools for hiring and no real method of detecting who they should hire or not hire, or for that matter, even who they should or should not interview. There appears to be a lot of advice out there but very, very little workability. The advice I’ve seen given by most “experts” on hiring doesn’t work in the real world. Many entrepreneurs, we find, are concerned about whether they are asking the right questions in the interview as if there is some magic question that will detect a good or bad employee. There is no such question. It is a myth.
We have found most businesspeople rely too much on the applicant’s appearance, what the applicant tells them, their tone of voice, and manners. The applicants, on the other hand, tell them what they want to hear, and the businessperson usually says, “Well, we might as well give them a try; they look and sound good to me.”
This is hardly the way it should be done.
Per the survey, what business professionals want to know is, “How does one really know if the person is going to be right for my business?”
What can business owners do to handle this situation?
We have discovered there are many missing steps in the hiring process, and most of the steps that are done are done incorrectly. I’ll cover a few of the correct ones briefly to just give you some ideas you can use.
First, one has to ask himself or herself, “Is our hiring ad attracting the right kind of applicant?” For example: Advertising a lot of benefits in your hiring ads usually brings in applicants who are more interested in your benefits than in being motivated employees, which is of course what you want.
Secondly, business owners lack a good battery of tests that screen out the “undesirables” as we call them.
This should be done before an interview takes place. There are custom tests for businesspeople to use that work exceptionally well when applied correctly. These tests are only the beginning of the screening process.
Thirdly, now that you have a possible candidate, an interview takes place. If they “pass” the interview process, we have what is called the “working interview” program, where the applicant does a trial run for a few days or weeks to see if he/she is a good fit for your business. We set up things for them to do to show productivity or lack thereof.
There’s an important point to make right here. When hiring, most businesses hire someone, then after a couple of months find that person won’t do the job, casino online then they hire another. After 90 days they find he or she won’t work. So they fire the person and hire another. Sound typical? Well, it’s economically ruinous.
In fact, ideally, you wouldn’t just hire the one candidate that looks best even after testing. Read what L. Ron Hubbard had to say about hiring secretarial help, in an article entitled “Recruit in Excess”:
A firm hires 3 people feeling they need 1.
At the end of 150 days, they have 1 person.
But they had 150 days of correspondence. And a profit.
The economical answer in terms of saved profit is to keep up the production. Don’t fixate on personnel. Always do multiple personnel procurement.
This is only a brief outline, and there is more to it. But it doesn’t have to be complicated. Without testing and expertise in good hiring practices, business owners usually hire the wrong person four out of five times.
Without these steps done properly, business owners are usually shooting in the wind and hire by the seat of their pants. I’ve seen a success rate of about 20–30 percent without these tools if they are lucky.
We’ve been doing this for thirty years now. Our success rate is 100 percent when the steps are followed to the letter.
I hope this helps.
Kevin Willson
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