Hiring How-Tos: What Every Employer Should Have In Their Hiring Handbook

The average small business has 10 employees. That number goes up as the size of the company increases, often into the hundreds or even thousands. That means that even if you run a small business, you’ll have to handle hiring an employee at some point. 

Hiring is a delicate and sometimes difficult process. It can take over a month of searching to fill even one position, and often you end up filling that same role again in less than two years. It’s frustrating, and it leaves you wondering if there’s another way.

While the process can’t be avoided entirely, it can be made much less painful when you design your hiring handbook. Here are a few hiring how-tos you should remember to include if you want to minimize your time and maximize your efficiency.

Strategic Saving: Don’t Waste Time Finding The Right Team

According to the Society of Human Resource Management, it costs between $3,000 and $5,000 for the average company to hire one new employee. This cost includes things like job board fees, assessment costs, recruiter expenses, and branding efforts.

Those costs continue to add up the longer it takes you to find the right employee, so it’s in your best interest to speed up the process whenever possible. One way you can do this if you’re currently in the hiring market is to optimize your candidate attraction with the help of a professional talent acquisition company.

They can help you attract the most fitting potential hires by highlighting the unique features of your company and brand. Through this, you will be able to attract talent that has goals and skills that align with your company’s needs and values, which increases the chance of a happy partnership.

That happy partnership will increase your retention rate, which means less time and money spent hiring new employees. 

When you master the hiring how-to, you’ll be on track to building and maintaining your ideal workforce.

Improve Interviews: Ask The Real Questions And Get The Important Answers

On average, employers interview 6 to 10 people for each job opening they have. The length of those interviews is usually 45 minutes to 1 hour. That’s a lot of time and money spent interviewing candidates who mostly won’t be picked. 

To make the process as efficient as possible, and save some money, your interviewers should focus on the important questions. Here are a few sample questions that can help an interviewer get a feel for how the candidate would function in the role. 

• What skill makes you most qualified for this position?

• How would you describe your ideal work environment?

• Tell me about a time you set a challenging goal for yourself, and how you accomplished it.

• How are you going to continue to develop your professional skills and knowledge?

• What do you see yourself achieving within the first 30 days?

• If I gave you the option to make one change to my company, what would you do? 

Remember to consider what your ideal answer or type of answer to these questions is before conducting the interview. That way, you can quickly decide if someone is on the right track to doing well in your business. 

Stop Surprises: Get All The Information Before You Hire

You interview dozens of candidates, you narrow them down to a handpicked few, you finally decide on your winner, and you hire them. Two weeks later, you find out about a part of their personal or professional history that compromises their ability to work for you. You’re forced to let them go and go through the hiring process again.

This may seem far-fetched, but consider this - over 19 million people in the United States have a felony conviction on their record. If your company has lenient policies, this may not be a huge problem, but if they don’t, resources would have been wasted. 

This sort of surprise can be avoided by initiating a simple background check. A standard check will show their employment, education, criminal, and credit background. This also gives you a better understanding of them professionally and personally. 

It’s also a good idea to run a quick internet search on your potential hires. Many problematic issues turn up in those kinds of searches that may be missed by a legal background check. These issues, though not illegal, can impact an employee’s effectiveness in a role at your company. 

It’s always better to know who a person is from the beginning than to find out when they have already been hired. If your company has specific rules in place regarding behavior and conduct outside of work, keep those in mind when running your checks. 

Over 50% of employers say they’ve found content on their employee’s social media pages that they wouldn’t want to be associated with their company. While your employee’s time is their own, it is your responsibility to ensure you’re choosing people that reflect well on your company’s brand. 

Adding these new tricks to your hiring handbook can put you in the perfect position to find your ideal team.