For today?s growing organisations, hiring people in big numbers in crunched timelines is one of the most crucial challenges
Unmesh Pawar
Hiring is an extremely crucial activity for any organisation and the pressure of getting it right the first time tends to increase the complexity of an already tough job. There are fall-outs of a wrong hire: additional training, more money and time. In a world that is becoming increasingly competitive, these factors do impact the organisation?s plans and slow things down to a great extent.
We have analysed that there are various factors leading to errors while hiring such as lack of understanding of the skill-sets on the part of the interviewer, hiring an over-skilled professional for the job, inability of the interviewer to identify the primary drivers/motivators or the hope of finding someone ?better? which brings out the:
Need to see ?more?: Even if the first candidate interviewed meets the desired criteria, the natural tendency is to ask for some more candidates to be interviewed to draw a relative comparison;
Need to identify the ?ideal? candidate: The tendency is to hire someone whose profile matches every line of the job description, which leads to loss of time;
Need to find ?clones?: A common practice followed by interviewers is to try and identify people who are identical in terms of skill-sets, past experience, qualification to the people already employed in the teams assuming that the performance levels will also be similar.
How do we manage this?
For today?s growing organisations, hiring people in big numbers in crunched timelines is one of the most crucial challenges. So it is important that we follow a set of rules that ensure hiring decisions are right the first time. This can be achieved by the following:
Hire not only for organisation growth but also for employee growth: How many times have we come across situations where people within a short time of joining an organisation start raising concerns about career growth and expectations mismatch, which most often than not leads to early separation. So it becomes important to step into the candidate?s shoes and think from his/her perspective.
Evaluate for ?cultural fitment?: Interviews should focus on evaluating the candidates for all job requirements. But what shouldn?t be negated is ?cultural fitment?, which plays a part in ensuring that candidates are assessed for their willingness, potential and drive to work in a different industry.
Set relevant benchmarks: The industry has seen a change in the definition of a good recruitment process. Organisations that lay emphasis on hiring from direct competition with the idea of getting their best practices in are now keen on hiring talent from different industries for fresh ideas. Similarly, conducting a psychometric test to judge a candidate?s analytical capabilities has been replaced by asking more situation-based questions.
Give yourself feedback about the interview: Everyone is faced with multiple situations where either the whole interviewing process is new or the expectation is to hire for a new skill-set or domain. Irrespective and even if you are a seasoned interviewer, it always helps to review the conversation with the candidate after the discussion is over. It helps you look back and evaluate if there were areas that did not get covered and could possibly have provided more insights.
Then there are basic things that include having a detailed job description, preparing yourself for the interview, asking the right questions, conducting a reference check, etc. The importance of all these activities cannot be undermined and they form an integral part of the interviewing process.
The author is senior vice-president, HR, Accenture India BPO