Improve Your SMB Hiring Process in 3 Simple Steps

Bringing in people who will contribute to the overall performance and reputation of your business is one of the most important decisions that you will make.

Hiring the wrong person, or someone who doesn’t stay long or whose performance isn’t up to scratch might be relatively easy to recover from for a larger business, but for a small to medium size business the impact of getting it wrong can be significant, not only financially, but in opportunity costs and possibly team morale, depending on the circumstances.

From just a financial perspective, it is reasonable to assume the cost of a mishire is the area of 50% to 60% of their yearly salary, at the minimum.

Some of the common hiring mistakes that small to medium size businesses make include the following:

·        Hiring the friend of a friend

·        They don’t ask their employees for recommendations

·        They hire someone they like

·        The interview is an informal chat

·        They have unrealistic expectations

·        They take candidates at face value

·        They hire too quickly, or too slowly.

Fortunately, there are a number of steps any business can take to significantly improve their hiring process and decisions; with the single best thing you can do is screen, test and interview, in that order.

Conduct a 10-to-15-minute telephone screen to confirm key pay and conditions of employment, the candidate’s motivation and do they meet the technical requirements of the role.

If the candidate is deemed as good enough, then refer them to Fermion for profiling and testing.

You then have significant data on the candidate to decide if a face-to-face interview is warranted and worth the time and resources. If you decide to interview, you then use the screening data, test results and their CV to compliment your interview.

Having all that data gives the interview panel far more material to work with than you would ever have if you just called the candidate in for an interview.

That 3-step process (screen, test and interview) can be done by any size business, and it can’t but not improve your hiring decisions. Even if you are interested in a friend of a friend, still put them through the same process.

The bottom line: if you are tired of hiring the wrong person, or you want to build a high performing team, you need data about each candidate before you interview; use the test results to compliment your interview.

A typical battery of tests that covers IQ, EQ and personality will ask the candidate over 200 question – imagine using that data to enhance your interview.

Telephone screen and then psychometric testing and then only interview good candidates. Try this approach and your hiring decisions will improve significantly.

About the Author:

Christopher Apps is an Organisational Psychologist and the owner of Fermion. He stays updated on the latest psychology research and shares evidence-based insights. The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and “Recruitment to Retention: How to Select Good Staff & Keep Them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please feel free to contact us at Fermion.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt.