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The biggest risk companies take when hiring at scale is destroying their current culture. It only takes one bad hire to harm the morale of a company. Hiring quality talent takes time and requires a strategy, regardless of a crisis or not. Investing the time upfront to create a recruiting process will prevent employers from hiring people who will taint or destroy their current workplace culture.
Here’s how companies can prevent toxic hires and create a process that scales.
Identify Red Flags And Toxic Behaviors
Hire with the long-term in mind even if the role is temporary. During a crisis, when there’s a surge in recruitment demands, red flags are often overlooked in an effort to fill roles quickly. This hire-fast mentality creates larger problems that contribute to toxic cultures. Every single hire contributes positively or negatively to a company’s culture regardless of their position or rank. Impulsive and poor hires present a new set of problems that can damage a company’s hard-earned reputation, lose their competitive advantage or bring lawsuits against them.
Bad candidates come in a variety of experience levels. They may have an impressive resume, reputable background or a rare and desirable skillset. The resume alone shouldn’t dictate the hire especially since most resumes exaggerate skills and competencies. Even if they check all the boxes, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be a good fit.
Red flags and toxic behaviors come in many forms such as
- Conflicting answers
- Negativity, trash talking, complaining and blaming
- Avoiding certain questions or unable to answer clearly (lack of specific work examples)
- Poor communication skills (not listening, speaking over the interview, raising their voice, aggressive tone)
- Chronic job hopping without an explanation
- Upfront demands
Interviewing is about asking specific questions, gauging responses, eliminating doubt, observing body language and visualizing how the candidate will fit in. The more targeted the question, the better. Interviewers should ask a mix of behavioral, situational and skill-based questions.
Establish A Standard Process
Despite more than 26 million Americans being out of work, that doesn’t mean the market is flooded with quality candidates seeking work. Many newly unemployed individuals are using this opportunity to freelance, do contract work or start their own business to bring in immediate cash and keep their skills relevant.
Establishing a standard process means having a plan in place prior to posting a job that can also be used for other open positions. Human resources, the hiring manager and those involved in the interview process should come together for an intake meeting. An intake meeting makes sure everyone is on the same page with a thorough understanding of their role during the recruitment process by:
- Clarifying job responsibilities by separating must-haves from nice-to-haves
- Determining the ideal person for the job
- Defining everyone’s role during the interview process
- Establishing interview stages and who will be involved at each stage as well as follow-up meetings
- Understanding everyone’s interviewing capabilities
- Eliminating potential duplicate interview questions or stages that serve no purpose
This helps prevent miscommunication, breaks in the process and repelling a quality candidate due to a poor or disorganized interview experience. Follow-up meetings determine if the candidate should be advanced to the next stage, rejected or hired. Companies can use technology to help streamline the recruitment process and make decisions faster.
Use Technology Wisely
There are a variety of platforms that can streamline the interview process. Greenhouse provides an interactive scorecard where interviewers submit evidence-based feedback on a candidate. A few benefits of the candidate scorecard are it:
- Provides immediate responses to help make final decisions more quickly
- Eliminates bias from the hiring process
- Prevents hiring managers from having to be chased down to provide feedback
- Keeps everyone updated of where the candidate is at in the process
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a platform that holds the job description, applications, candidate profiles and allows hiring managers and recruiters to communicate with applicants. An ATS integrates with a company website as well as job boards such as LinkedIn, Indeed and Monster to name a few. Greenhouse and BambooHR are multifunctional platforms that also serve as an ATS. Resumes and applications are organized by position and filtered by keyword.
Human resources should make it a point to go through their ATS application process themselves to eliminate inefficiencies. Oftentimes, companies lose quality candidates due to them having to retype all of the information that was on the resume they uploaded. Additionally, candidates are met with errors that prevent them from being able to finish or submit their application. As a result, they abandon it altogether.
Programmatic job advertising uses artificial intelligence to place job postings in front of the right people at the right time on the right sites. It relies on data to make recommendations on where to post a job advertisement or can post it on behalf a companies instead. JobAdX, Appcast and PandoLogic are a few programmatic recruitment platforms that help companies maximize results for high-volume recruiting without having to pay exorbitant fees.
Companies can utilize tools such as Google Hangouts, Skype and Zoom to conduct video interviews. It’s important to maintain the face-to-face interaction so interviewers can see body language, engagement and get a feel for the candidate.
Lastly, assessments are a great way to provide insight on where a team is lacking and what gap they need to fill when hiring. The Predictive Index Assessment is an invaluable tool that helps take the guess work out of recruiting and increases the likelihood of hiring right-fitting candidates. The Predictive Index Assessment can be given to candidates who pass the pre-screen interview before starting the interview process. The results help determine if their skills will fill the gaps needed to round out the team. Additionally, HR can tailor job postings to highlight the skills needed to attract the right candidates.
Be Upfront About Expectations
Traditionally, employers believed their company culture was meant to be kept a secret. They kept candidates in the dark and didn’t share anything about it until after they’ve already joined the company. The problem that arises is when candidates aren’t aligned with the culture, leadership style or team dynamics, they grow resentful for accepting.
Employers should communicate as much as possible upfront through their website, job description, social media channels and during the interview. This can be done by sharing next steps and resources such as videos, presentations, published materials as well as information about the culture and values. From there, candidates can decide if they want to move forward or not; preventing anyone’s time from being wasted.