To position themselves for future success, organizations must understand where they are at the moment and what they must do to reach where they want to go. New skills and new kinds of jobs will be essential to the forward-moving organization. The people who are recruited into their midst now must be sufficiently flexible to be effective contributors to the organization of tomorrow. Think about the candidates you are interviewing and choosing between: who wants to be comfortable and do the same task in the same way, and who seeks a challenge and wants to develop?

In some cases, you may be recruiting a person specifically to lead the way toward development and growth. Consider your organization’s other goals and values: how do you want to move ahead, and are there right and wrong ways to accomplish this? While it is important to allow and encourage creative differences when examining different options offered by candidates, bear in mind that bringing in a person with fundamentally different values could result in a costly mistake that sets your organization back.

Draw up a document that outlines your organization’s strategic goals and defines the behaviors, skills, and abilities that would support them. Take the exercise further by outlining the strategic goals of the team for which you are hiring, and define the attributes, experience, and abilities that would help them achieve these goals. This approach will require you to understand the direction of both the organization and the team; hopefully, the two are complementary. It will usually be easier to define strategic goals for the organization; individual teams may not always outline theirs. Work with them to do so—however, be warned that this requires care and considerable thought. Then when matching up the abilities, attitudes, behaviors, and skills of each of your candidates to the items on the two lists, you will begin to see where alignment and compatibility exist and where they don’t.

At the beginning of the recruitment process, you drew up job and person descriptions to set out the demands of the role and the experience, character, and qualifications required. You may also have created a decision matrix to give these requirements some sort of priority. When you reach the stage of making a final decision, return to these documents and use them as a framework against which to review the information gathered from interviews, tests, assessment center activities, and resumes.

Ask yourself what percentage of your hiring decision will be based on information gained in the interview itself—100 percent, 50 percent, or less? If the decision will depend primarily, or entirely, upon the interviews, then devise a weighting system for the responses to each question. Let’s say that you decide each answer would be worth a maximum of five points. At the same time, each question would have a different value depending upon its importance to the hiring decision. For example, a candidate might earn four points for the quality of her response to a question, which has a weighted value of three points. The total earned value of her response to that question would be 12 points (4 x 3).

If you held an assessment center, bring into the hiring equation the information obtained through the psychometric tests, exercises, and other activities. Create a score sheet or assessment sheet for each candidate. List each element or activity that you “tested” or “scored” them on, and note the appropriate score, points, or place on the behavioral spectrum^*. Or you could keep it simple, and put checks by the elements where they performed to an acceptable level and double checks for outstanding performance. What kind of picture is emerging of each of the candidates? Is there one candidate who clearly stands out from the rest? Or are there several with a similar collection of strengths? Eliminate the most obviously weak performers among your candidates. Discuss with your colleagues and any external experts the strengths demonstrated by the candidates who remain contenders, and check if they are the most critical strengths needed by the organization.

Next, consider the organization and team goals you identified, along with the list of abilities, behaviors, and skills that are required to support them. Compare these with the strengths of each individual candidate as outlined on the score sheet. Ideally, the candidate whose skills, experience, and other characteristics most closely meet the job criteria will also be shown to be a good fit with the organization and team goals. Remember throughout the selection process that you are measuring candidates against the required criteria, and not comparing them to fellow candidates. Being human, it is inevitable that some discussion will result in candidate comparison, but keep in mind that you are looking for the best match to the job and to the organization.

As you approach your decision, remember that a methodical approach to hiring is the best way to ensure that the job criteria, person specification, and organization goals are given due consideration when choosing candidates. However, keep your mind open to the unexpected if a candidate has demonstrated an unanticipated skill, personality trait, or other quality that adds a new dimension to their application for the job. Perhaps the candidate lacks a qualification, trait, or experience that you initially considered essential for the role but offers something else that you had not thought about, in spite of your in-depth examination of the job requirements. If you are seriously considering this candidate, weigh up whether you can make that trade-off without it having a negative effect somewhere along the line. But also be clear about which characteristics, skills, or experience you cannot afford to do without. Traits such as integrity and a constructive, positive management style should be non-negotiable, and a specific qualification may be less important to your organization than a candidate’s unexpected expertise in a new and exciting technology.

The salary is one of the offer elements that can make or break the deal. Most employers benchmark salary data to ensure that they pay their employees competitive wages for their marketplace, and offer an attractive selection of benefits. At the least, studying recent salary surveys for jobs in your industry sector will help you to adjust the basic salary that you will offer your new recruits, to reflect the appropriate levels of education and experience, as well as the geographic region.

Once you have put together an offer, telephone your chosen candidate to share the good news verbally before you send out the letter. Mention a few of the offer highlights, such as pay and start date. They may ask for a few days to consider the opportunity after studying the written offer, which is perfectly acceptable. However, an attempt to significantly renegotiate the offered salary should be viewed with caution, particularly if a range was originally advertised.

Advise your candidates early on in the recruitment process that if you should decide to hire them, you will need the names and contact details of two or three professional references who would be willing to speak to you about their current or previous jobs. Emphasize to candidates that employment will be contingent on your being able to obtain suitable references.

It is not uncommon for hiring managers today to send out forms requesting information on their new recruits, to make it easier for those giving references to provide information. However, it is best if you can actually speak to a reference. If you are able to speak with someone directly, ask the basics, but also inquire about the quality of the recruit’s work, strengths and weaknesses, ability to work with others, and any anecdotes that offer insight into how your potential recruit made a difference in the workplace. Other questions may come to mind, too, but be sure that you ask only work-related questions. Avoid asking anything you wouldn’t be willing to ask the candidate directly, such as anything to do with race, religion, ethnicity, marital status, or age.

Hopefully, you will receive information that confirms your best impressions about the person you have selected for the job. However, do make contingency plans in case you get a negative report about your potential recruit. If you receive one less-than-favorable report but others that are positive, ask your candidate for another reference you may contact; there may have been a personality conflict between manager and employee, the manager may have been jealous of the employee, or perhaps that particular job was not a good fit for your potential hire. On the other hand, if none of the references seem willing to confirm information the candidate has given you, you may want to reconsider your decision to hire this person. However, sometimes former managers are simply not sufficiently interested to pass on information, positive or negative, about ex-employees. This should not be held against the candidate; you will have to consider this a “neutral” reference, and ask the candidate for another. Another scenario that has been known to unfold is the use of family or friends as professional references, so be certain to verify the circumstances in which the reference knew the candidate.

Failing to get a job you want is one of life’s great disappointments. The bottom line is that you as an individual did not offer everything the employer wanted. Being able to empathize with that blow to self-esteem will go a long way toward guiding your treatment of the unselected candidates. Treating them with dignity can create a good impression of your organization as an employer. Even though your attention may be focused on bringing on board your new employee, ensuring that those you did not select walk away with a positive impression is time well spent.

Send all non-selected candidates a formal letter confirming that they did not get the job. The tone must be businesslike, but inject some warmth, with a comment referring back to an interesting bit of information the candidate revealed in the interview, if possible. Depending on the number of candidates you interviewed, you may have time to telephone non-selectees. If so, tell them that they have not been selected, but thank them for applying and wish them well in their job search.

The rejecting letter’s main purpose is to tell non-selectees they were not successful this time, but it also gives you a vehicle to encourage promising candidates to apply to your organization again. You could also invite them to apply for specific roles in your organization for which they may be better suited. However, letters to the candidates who would not be a good fit for the organization should be just as professional and courteous as those to the people whom you would like to see apply again in the future.

Analyze your collated data to look for indicators that your process is inadequate. Warning signs might include too few applications from candidates with the right skill sets, or information gaps about candidates’ capabilities. Exchange feedback with the colleagues involved in the process about interviewing style, the relevance of questions asked, and what could be improved.

Keep records of the number of days it has taken to hire for the role, from the beginning of the process to the candidate’s formal acceptance. Closely monitor the total cost-to-hire—this will include costs incurred for advertising, recruitment consultants, assessment center tests, background checking carried out by external consultants, venue hire, and staff hours. Effectively managing the time it takes to hire means balancing the quick and efficient filling of the position with not rushing to put the first available candidate in place. Keeping cost-to-hire at a fiscally responsible level is challenging, which means that you must keep tabs on the return-on-investment of each expense.

If your organization does not already have a program in place for preparing recruits for their new workplace, it is time to build one. One way to start making new employees feel as though they are already part of the team is to send them employee information, such as a staff handbook, before their first day. Or you could send them a link and log-in for the organization website’s intranet so that they can get a feel for its day-to-day goings on as well as benefits, social events, dress code, and the organizational structure. If your organization has branded materials, such as pens, T-shirts, or caps, give these items as a gift to communicate the message “You are one of us.” If the person is relocating from a distance, send information about the local area, such as accommodation, schools, and leisure facilities.

Advise your new employees where they need to report on their first day, with directions on how to get there. If there is an organization-wide first-day orientation, plan for a colleague from their team to meet them afterward. Then let them spend the first day getting to know the workplace, their work equipment, and their colleagues. A nice touch is for the line manager to take the newcomer out for lunch on the first day to spend some time over a meal discussing the job, plans for the first week at work, and the team’s current projects. This can get the relationship off on a good footing by demonstrating the line manager’s accessibility to team members.

Most importantly, your new hire needs to understand your organization’s mission, values, and strategy moving forward. They need to know where they fit in, and how they are expected to contribute to the organization’s day-to-day operations as well as the future. Having their job description at hand to review will reinforce their duties and responsibilities. Mapping out a clear idea of the team’s targets over the next few months will provide a view of how all the pieces fit together. A well-thought out and welcoming beginning will help newcomers to start this phase of their careers with confidence. And that is one of the best ways to retain the best and brightest talent.