How to Hire the Best Job Candidates

You’ve likely experienced this scenario more than once: Due to the growth of your business, or an employee leaving, a position has opened up on your team. You publish a job listing, read through a pile of applications, and narrow them down to a few promising candidates. You have interviews, and you think you found just the right person.

You make them an offer, and they accept. You onboard them, they click with the team, and things are great.

A few weeks in, the problems start. They make a costly mistake or miss a deadline. You tell them that they can always ask for help, and they have a team to support them. But it happens again. The new hire’s mood deteriorates, and it’s just a matter of which happens first: they give you their resignation or you show them the door.

For owners and executives, this process is exhausting, frustrating, and costly in terms of money and time.

Such situations are unavoidable. However, if you’re running into this problem frequently, you’re probably overdue to revisit your interview, vetting, and hiring processes. Below are some suggestions on how you can uncover potential problems before you hire someone.

When reviewing a resume, try to determine how thoughtfully the candidate has positioned themselves for the role.

It’s easy to get into a frame of mind where you’re trying to check the desired boxes. “Do they have skilled A, B, and C? Do they have experience? Did they take reasonable care when preparing their resume? OK, throw that one in the interview pile!”

But this is a surface level evaluation. It’s a quantitative approach, rather than a qualitative approach. It doesn’t tell you how good those skills are, nor how thoughtful and creative the applicant is at wielding the skills they have picked up.

Dig into the resume. How have they described their experience and skill set? When thinking about the demands of the job they are applying for, does it seem that they have shaped their resume in a way that reflects understanding of the job they want? Have they connected the dots between their strengths, and how those can be brought to bear on the job–or have they simply listed strengths that are the most broadly relevant to a variety of potential employers?

If they included a cover letter, that gives you more material to work with. You may be able to glean information such as how much effort they put into researching your organization and the role they are applying for, as well as their ability to communicate in writing.

Getting beyond the basic checking of the boxes and evaluating candidates on their strategic and analytical abilities, as evidenced by their resumes, will make a big difference in the long run.

In job interviews, get away from the standard-yet-useless questions which have been the cornerstone of job interviews for decades.

Anyone who’s been in a job interview has heard–or asked–the usual questions: Where do you see yourself in five years? What’s your greatest weakness? Why do you want to work at this company? How do you handle conflict?

We’ve been effectively trained to ask these questions. But they do little to shed light on whether a candidate will succeed or not. (“Where do you see yourself in five years?” is especially useless. The turnover rate in most industries is north of 40%. The most honest answer would likely be, “Not here.”) These sorts of questions give you a chance to read between the lines a bit and spot problematic social behaviors, but that’s about it.

If you want to shake things up, if possible, take them on a tour of your business or out to a meal. Seeing how they interact with other people and navigate complex social situations will give you a great deal of insight into their character. Are they respectful to superiors, but disrespectful to those they perceive as inferiors? Are they curious about others? Do they get flustered if something unexpected happens?

Even if you have to handle hiring remotely, you can have group interviews with team members on the call, so they can participate and ask questions. You can get a feel for how a candidate meshes with the team’s chemistry, or not. Be sure to follow up with the team members to get a sense of their feelings. If there’s someone on your team who has recognized problems in previous hires before they became inescapable, then perhaps their opinion needs to figure into your evaluation. You may even consider giving them the ability to veto candidates, if their insight has been especially good in the past.

Don’t shy away from testing candidates either. Ask them about hypothetical situations and what they would do. Get them to put their skills and knowledge to use.You may not agree with the answer or solution they provide, but if they can give a thoughtful answer that makes sense, you know that they have a useful working knowledge relevant to the job.

Be sure to give them plenty of opportunities to ask questions. Their questions will tell you how they learn on the job, how much attention to detail they have, and how they piece together information to form a larger understanding. In addition, someone who is able and willing to ask questions and can identify what the right questions to ask are, is someone who is going to be much more capable of learning from managers and teammates, and better serve the needs of your clientele.

When talking to references, ask detailed questions about past performance.

If the employment laws in your state allow you to ask references detailed questions, then you should. This is where you should be asking the standard, obvious questions that are used too often in job interviews:

• What’s their demeanor like at work?
• What are their strengths and weaknesses?
• How do they perform under pressure?
• How do they get along with colleagues and customers?
• How organized are they?
• How did they contribute to or detract from the company culture?

Also, LinkedIn is a powerful research tool. You may find that applicants have crossed paths with friends or previous coworkers of yours, or with past coworkers of your employees. Reaching out to them. Use these connections to get an honest perspective on applicants.

Implementing the above suggestions will require you to invest more time in the hiring process. But if you have repeatedly invested thousands of hours and thousands of dollars into employees who didn’t work out, then it’s likely that a more thorough hiring and vetting process will save you money in the long run.