Remember marketing again? When you are marketing to attract your target customer and a sale is made – your business must the deliver on what was promised in the sales process. Once you employ someone, you need to make good on delivering everything you promised during the recruiting and hiring stages. This is key to building your team.
Step 1: Recruiting
–Getting clear on the position requirements – Organisation Chart and Job Agreement in place
–Getting clear on the type of person: their skills, their experience, their values and attitude
–Developing your message
–Putting your message out there
–Fielding the responses in readiness for the next stage
Step 2: Hiring
–Review of applicants
–Screening the applicants
–Invitation to meet
–Interview process
–Selection process
–Making the Offer
So let’s look at the traditional interview process first.
This is what normally happens.
Once the job has been advertised and responses have come in, you do a bit of filtering usually based on what is written down in the resumes, or the way applicants have followed, or not followed the application process. Okay…all normal so far.
Then, when you have narrowed down your field, you or someone in your business, get on the phone and invite that person in for an interview and a time is set. Then you need to find time in your already busy timetable to schedule those interviews. And if there is someone else you want involved in the interview, you have to make sure the time works for them as well. And if there are say, more than three or four candidates to see, you know what’s going to happen – that interview process is almost certainly going to stretch over a couple of days. If you are really well organised, you might be able to see them all in one day. Given the way interviews are conducted more often than not, the process will last between 45 and 60 minutes, with a gap in between for the two of you to confer. If it’s four candidates, you have now put eight man hours into the process during your work day. And that is multiplied if there are more. To say nothing of feeling like a broken record as you go through your spiel about the company and the job for the umpteenth time.
And we won’t even talk about the time wasted waiting for those who simply don’t turn up for the interview. Also, it’s entirely possible that you will have many more than four, depending on the position and how well worded your message was.
And if they are spread over a couple of days, how objective is your evaluation?
The next thing that generally happens is that you narrow the choice down to two (maybe three) and invite them back for a more in-depth interview so you can make up your mind – and there goes another four or six hours.
Now this is all fine. But what if you could work smarter?
What if you could ask exactly the right questions that would reveal everything you needed to know about them that wasn’t on the resume? For instance, their attitudes and values. Remember how important they are? What if you could evaluate them in a way that helps you to be really objective?
And what if you could get to your final two or three – even if you have 15 or 20 applicants in under two hours? And still know you have given everyone the same information (rather than repeating it that many times in the traditional interview situation)?
Stay tuned for Part Four next week when I will walk you through the most fantastic interview process that is not the stock standard way of conducting new employee interviews. I promise you it works brilliantly and will save you so much time as well as deliver the best results that, if you follow the steps exactly, you will be so excited, you will never do it the traditional way again.
Until then…
P.S. Learn more about working ON your business–talk to the coach! Click here to connect with me!