Going through traditional recruiting channels

Your job is to develop a recruitment system that helps you find the kinds of people you want to hire. Here are some of the best ways to find candidates for your positions:

• Internal candidates: In most organizations, the first place to look for candidates is within the organization. If you do your job training and developing employees (see Chapter 1 in Book 6), you probably have plenty of candidates to consider for your job openings. Only after you exhaust your internal candidates should you look outside your organization. Not only is hiring people this way less expensive and easier, but you also get happier employees, improved morale, and new hires who are already familiar with your organization.

• Personal referrals: Whether from co-workers, professional colleagues, friends, relatives, or neighbors, you can often find great candidates through referrals. Who better to present a candidate than someone whose opinion you already value and trust? You get far more insight about the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses from the people who refer them than you ever get from résumés alone. Not only that, but research shows that people hired through current employees tend to work out better, stay with the company longer, and act happier.

  When you’re getting ready to fill a position, make sure you let people know about it. Your employees and co-workers may well mount their own Twitter and Facebook campaigns for you, getting the word out to a wide audience.

• Temporary agencies: Hiring temps, or temporary employees, has become routine for many companies. When you simply have to fill a critical position for a short period of time, temporary agencies are the way to go — no muss, no fuss. And the best part is that when you hire temps, you get the opportunity to try out employees before you buy them. If you don’t like the temps you get, no problem. Call the agency, and it sends replacements before you know it. But if you like your temps, most agencies allow you to hire them at a nominal fee or after a minimum time commitment. Either way, you win.

  One more point: If you’re using temps, you can complete your organization’s necessary work while you continue looking for the right full-time employee. Doing so buys you more time to find the best person for the job without feeling pressure to hire someone who doesn’t really meet all your needs.

• Professional associations: Most professions have their accompanying associations that look out for their interests. Whether you’re a doctor (and belong to the American Medical Association) or a truck driver (and belong to the Teamsters), you can likely find an affiliated association for whatever you do for a living. Association newsletters, magazines, websites, blogs, and social networking sites are great places to advertise your openings when you’re looking for specific expertise, because your audience is already prescreened for you.
• Employment agencies: If you’re filling a particularly specialized position, are recruiting in a small market, or simply prefer to have someone else take care of recruiting and screening your applicants, employment agencies are a good, albeit pricey alternative (with a cost of up to a third of the employee’s first-year salary, or more). Although employment agencies can usually locate qualified candidates in lower-level or administrative positions, you may need help from an executive search firm or headhunter (someone who specializes in recruiting key employees away from one firm to place in a client’s firm) for your higher-level positions.
• Want ads: Want ads can be relatively expensive, but they’re an easy way to get your message out to a large cross-section of potential candidates. You can choose to advertise in your local paper, in nationally distributed publications such as The Wall Street Journal, or on popular job-search websites (see the next section for suggestions). On the downside, you may find yourself sorting through hundreds or even (gulp) thousands of unqualified candidates to find a few great ones.

Leveraging the power of the Internet

The proliferation of job search tools, corporate web pages, and online employment agencies has brought about an entirely new dimension in recruiting. Your own website lets you present almost unlimited amounts and kinds of information about your business and your job openings — in text, audio, graphic, and video formats. Your site works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Consider a few of the best ways to leverage the power of the Internet in your own hiring efforts:

• Websites and blogs: If you don’t already have a great recruiting page on your company website, you should. In addition to this baseline item, also consider setting up company blogs where employees can describe what they do and how they do it. This gives prospective job candidates insight into your organization, helping them decide for themselves whether yours is the kind of organization they want to actively pursue. Be sure to include a function where people can supply their email address or sign up for an RSS feed to be updated as new positions open. Prices to set up a website or blog vary from free to a few thousand dollars a year, depending on how many bells and whistles you require.

• Email campaigns: If you set up the email function on your website just mentioned, you’ll soon collect a large number of addresses from potential job candidates. Don’t just sit there — use them! Be sure to email an announcement to everyone on your list every time you have a job opening. Even if the people who receive your email message aren’t interested, they may know someone who is and may forward your announcement.

• Social networking sites: Two, in particular, deserve your attention if you hope to broaden your search for good candidates: Facebook (www.facebook.com) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). Many millions of people have established accounts at both of these sites; however, LinkedIn was specifically designed to help job seekers network with one another to find new job opportunities. This makes it a particularly effective way for you to get the word out about your open positions. Although Facebook isn’t specifically set up for job networking, you can set up a fan page there and use it as an effective recruiting platform. There’s no charge to set up and use a Facebook or LinkedIn account.
• Twitter: Many organizations today are using Twitter (www.twitter.com) as a real-time platform for getting out information to anyone interested in getting it. This includes prospective job applicants. The variety of information you can send out to the world is limited only by your imagination — and by the character limit for individual tweets. There’s no charge to set up and use your Twitter account.
• Traditional job-hunting sites: A number of job-hunting sites have become popular with people looking for new positions. This makes them good platforms from which to pitch your own job openings. Popular ones include Career Builder (www.careerbuilder.com), Indeed (www.indeed.com), Simply Hired (www.simplyhired.com), and Monster (www.monster.com). You’ll likely have to pay to post your jobs on these sites — prices vary. For a free option, don’t forget your local Craigslist (www.craigslist.com).

Asking the right questions

More than anything else, the heart of the interview process is the questions you ask and the answers you get in response. You get the best answers when you ask the best questions. Lousy questions often result in lousy answers that don’t really tell you whether the candidate is right for the job.

A great interviewer asks great questions. According to Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the perennially popular job-hunting guide What Color Is Your Parachute?, you can categorize all interview questions under one of the following headings:

• Why are you here? Why is the person sitting across from you going to the trouble of interviewing with you today? You have just one way to find out — ask. You may assume that the answer is because he or she wants a job with your firm, but what you find may surprise you.

  Consider the story of the interviewee who forgot that he was interviewing for a job with Hewlett-Packard. During the entire interview, the applicant referred to Hewlett-Packard by the name of one of its competitors. He didn’t get the job.

• What can you do for us? Always an important consideration! Of course, your candidates are all going to dazzle you with their incredible personalities, experience, work ethic, and love of teamwork — that almost goes without saying. However, despite what many job seekers seem to believe, the question is not, “What can your firm do for me?” — at least, not from your perspective. The question that you want an answer to is, “What can you do for us?”

• What kind of person are you? Few of your candidates will be absolute angels or demons, but don’t forget that you’ll spend a lot of time with the person you hire. You want to hire someone you’ll enjoy being with during the many work hours, weeks, and years that stretch before you — and the holiday parties, company picnics, and countless other events you’re expected to attend. You also want to confirm a few other issues: Are your candidates honest and ethical? Do they share your views regarding work hours, responsibility, and so forth? Are they responsible and dependable employees? Would they work well in your company culture? Of course, all your candidates will answer in the affirmative to mom-and-apple-pie questions like these. So how do you find the real answers?

  You might try to “project” applicants into a typical, real-life scenario and then see how they’d think it through. For example, ask the prospect what she would do if a client called at 5 p.m. with an emergency order that needed to be delivered by 9 a.m. the next morning. This way, there’s no “right” answer and candidates are forced to expose their thinking process: what questions they’d ask, what strategies they’d consider, which people they’d involve, and so forth. Ask open-ended questions and let your candidates do most of the talking.

• Can we afford you? It does you no good to find the perfect candidate but, at the end of the interview, discover that you’re so far apart in pay range that you’re nearly in a different state. Keep in mind that the actual wage you pay to workers is only part of an overall compensation package. You may not be able to pull together more money for wages for particularly good candidates, but you may be able to offer them better benefits, a nicer office, the option of working from home, extra time off, a more impressive title, or a key to the executive sauna.

Following interviewing do’s

So what can you do to prepare for your interviews? The following handy-dandy checklist gives you ideas on where to start:

• Review the résumés of each interviewee the morning before interviews start. Not only is it extremely poor form to wait to read your interviewees’ résumés during the interview, but you miss out on the opportunity to tailor your questions to those little surprises you invariably discover in the résumés.
• Become intimately familiar with the job description. Are you familiar with all the duties and requirements of the job? Surprising new hires with duties that you didn’t tell them about — especially when they’re major duties — isn’t a pathway to new-hire success.
• Draft your questions before the interview. Make a checklist of the key experience, skills, and qualities that you seek in your candidates, and use it to guide your questions. Of course, one of your questions may trigger other questions that you didn’t anticipate. Go ahead with such questions, as long as they give you additional insights into your candidate and help illuminate the information you’re seeking with your checklist.
• Select a comfortable environment for both of you. Your interviewee will likely be uncomfortable regardless of what you do. You don’t need to be uncomfortable, too. Make sure that the interview environment is well ventilated, private, and protected from interruptions. You definitely don’t want your phone ringing off the hook or employees barging in during your interviews. You get the best performance from your interviewees when they aren’t thrown off track by distractions.

As you have no doubt gathered by now, interview questions are one of your best tools for determining whether a candidate is right for your company. Although some amount of small talk is appropriate to help relax your candidates, the heart of your interviews should focus on answering the questions just listed. Above all, don’t give up. Keep asking questions until you’re satisfied that you have all the information you need to make your decision.

Take lots of notes as you interview your candidates. Don’t rely on your memory when it comes to interviewing candidates for your job. If you interview more than a couple of people, you can easily forget who said exactly what, as well as what your impressions were of their performances. Not only are your written notes a great way to remember who’s who, but they’re an important tool to have when you’re evaluating your candidates.

And try to avoid the temptation to draw pictures of little smiley faces or that new car you’ve been lusting after. Write the key points of your candidates’ responses and their reactions to your questions. For example, if you ask why your candidate left her previous job, and she starts getting really nervous, make a note about this reaction. Finally, note your own impressions of the candidates:

• Top-notch performer — the star of her class.
• Fantastic experience with developing applications in a client/server environment. The best candidate yet.
• Geez, was this one interviewing for the right job?

Avoiding interviewing don’ts

If you’ve gone through the hiring process a few times already, you know that you can run into tricky situations during an interview and that certain questions can land you in major hot water if you make the mistake of asking them.

Some interviewing don’ts are merely good business practice. For example, accepting an applicant’s invitation for a date is probably not a good idea. Believe it or not, it happens. After a particularly drawn-out interview at a well-known high-tech manufacturer, a male candidate asked out a female interviewer. The interviewer considered her options and declined the date; she also declined to make Prince Charming a job offer.

Avoid playing power trips during the course of the interview. Forget the old games of asking trick questions, turning up the heat, or cutting the legs off their chairs (yes, some people still do this game playing) to gain an artificial advantage over your candidates. Get real — it’s the 21st century.

Some blunders are the major legal type — the kind that can land you and your company in court. Interviewing is one area of particular concern in the hiring process as it pertains to possible discrimination. For example, although you can ask applicants whether they are able to fulfill job functions, in the United States, you can’t ask them whether they have disabilities. Because of the critical nature of the interview process, you must know the questions that you absolutely should never ask a job candidate. Here is a brief summary of the kinds of topics that may get you and your business into trouble, depending on the exact circumstances:

• Age
• Arrest and conviction record
• Debts
• Disability
• Gender or gender identity
• Height and weight
• Marital status
• National origin
• Race or skin color
• Religion (or lack thereof)
• Sexual orientation

Legal or illegal, the point is that none of the preceding topics is necessary to determine applicants’ ability to perform their jobs. Therefore, ask questions that directly relate to the candidates’ ability to perform the tasks required. To do otherwise can put you at definite legal risk. In other words, what does count is job-related criteria — that is, information that’s directly pertinent to the candidate’s ability to do the job (you clearly need to decide this prior to interviewing!).

Checking references

Wow! What a résumé! What an interview! What a candidate! Would you be surprised to find out that this shining employee-to-be didn’t really go to Yale? Or that he really wasn’t the account manager on that nationwide marketing campaign? Or that his last supervisor wasn’t particularly impressed with his analytical skills?

A résumé and interview are great tools, but a reference check is probably the only chance you have to find out before you make a hiring decision whether your candidates are actually who they say they are. Depending on your organization, you may be expected to do reference checks. Or maybe your human resources department takes care of that task.

Depending on your industry and level of security consciousness, you may want to run a background check on your prospects before hiring them. The legal and privacy implications of doing so vary from state to state. You can check out www.privacyrights.org/small-business-owner-background-check-guide for an overview of the process of doing a background check. But you should definitely consult a lawyer licensed to practice in your state before doing your first background check.

The twin goals of checking references are to verify the information that your candidates have provided and to gain some candid insight into who your candidates really are and how they behave in the workplace. When you contact a candidate’s references, limit your questions to topics related to the work to be done. As in the interview process, asking questions that can be considered discriminatory to your candidates isn’t appropriate.

Here are some of the best ways to do your reference checking:

• Check academic references. A surprising number of people exaggerate or tell outright lies when reporting their educational experience. Start your reference check here.
• Call current and former supervisors. Getting information from employers is getting more difficult. Many businesspeople are rightfully concerned that they may be sued for libel or defamation of character if they say anything negative about current or former subordinates. Still, it doesn’t hurt to try. You get a much better picture of your candidates if you speak directly to their current and former supervisors instead of to their company’s human resources department — especially if the supervisors you speak to have left their firms. The most you’re likely to get from the HR folks is a confirmation that the candidate worked at the company during a specific period of time.
• Check your network of associates. If you belong to a professional association, union, or similar group of like-minded careerists, you have the opportunity to tap into the rest of the membership to get the word on your candidates. For example, if you’re a certified public accountant (CPA) and want to find out about a few candidates for your open accounting position, you can check with the members of your professional accounting association to see whether anyone knows anything about them.

• Do some surfing. On the web, that is. Google your candidate’s name, perhaps along with the name of the company where the person last worked or the city where she lives. Or do a search for your candidate on Facebook (www.facebook.com) or LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). You might be surprised by how much information you can uncover about a job candidate — good and bad — doing just a few simple web searches.

  But be careful. Many people have the same name. Make sure you have the right person!

Reviewing your notes

You did take interview notes, didn’t you? Now’s the time to drag them back out and look them over. Review the information package for each candidate — one by one — and compare your findings against your predetermined criteria. Take a look at the candidates’ résumés, your notes, and the results of your reference checks. How do they stack up against the standards you set for the position? Do you see any clear winners at this point? Any clear losers? Organize your candidate packages into the following stacks:

• Winners: These candidates are clearly the best choices for the position. You have no hesitation in hiring any one of them.
• Potential winners: These candidates are questionable for some reason. Maybe their experience isn’t as strong as that of other candidates, or perhaps you weren’t impressed with their presentation skills. Neither clear winners nor clear losers, you hire these candidates only after further investigation or if you can’t hire anyone from your pool of winners.
• Losers: These candidates are clearly unacceptable for the position. You simply don’t consider hiring any of them.

Conducting a second (or third) round

When you’re a busy business owner, you have pressure to get things done as quickly as possible, and you’re tempted to take shortcuts to achieve your goals. It seems that everything has to be done yesterday — or maybe the day before. When do you have the opportunity to really spend as much time as you want to complete a task or project? Time is precious when you have ten other projects crying for your attention. Time is even more valuable when you’re hiring for a vacant position that’s critical to your organization and needs to be filled right now.

Hiring is one area of business where you must avoid taking shortcuts. Remember, hire slowly and fire quickly (but within the rules). Finding the best candidates for your vacancies requires an investment of time and resources. Your company’s future depends on it. Great candidates don’t stay on the market long, though, so don’t allow the process to drag on too long. Make sure the candidates know your required time frame, and stick to it.

Depending on your organization’s policies or culture, or if you’re undecided on the best candidate, you may decide to bring candidates in for several rounds of interviews. But keep in mind that the timeline for an offer differs depending on the job you’re interviewing for. Lower-level job hunters cannot afford to be unemployed (if they are) for long, and they often get and accept job offers quickly. A higher-level position — say, a general manager — gives you more time.

The ultimate decision on how many rounds and levels of interviews to conduct depends on the nature of the job itself, the size of your company, and your policies and procedures. If the job is simple or at a relatively low level in the company, a single phone interview may be sufficient to determine the best candidate. However, if the job is complex or at a relatively high level in the organization, you may need several rounds of testing and personal interviews to determine the best candidate.

Checking employment eligibility

With today’s increased emphasis on national security and immigration status, employers are required to take some steps to verify the eligibility of employees to work in the U.S. You should obtain USCIS Form I-9 (Employment Eligibility Verification) from prospective employees. This form is used to collect information on the employee and document the verification steps. Be aware: An employer can be fined for failing to follow the process. In addition, there is a program called E-Verify, which allows employers to verify an applicant’s work status online. You can obtain Form I-9 and related information from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) website at www.uscis.gov. The E-Verify program is free, and you can find out more about it at www.e-verify.gov.

Immigrants can be a good source of workers, and you may be able to sponsor employees through various programs. For example, there are H-1B visas for specialty occupations, such technical or scientific workers. The USCIS website mentioned in the preceding paragraph has additional information about these and other employer-sponsored worker visas.

You should be aware of possible federal tax credits available for hiring certain targeted workers. For example, the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 extended the Work Opportunity Tax Credit, which provided tax credits for hiring qualified veterans. You can find current information at www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/work-opportunity-tax-credit.

Being objective

In some cases, you may prefer certain candidates because of their personalities or personal charisma, regardless of their abilities or work experience. Sometimes the desire to like these candidates can obscure their shortcomings, while a better qualified, albeit less socially adept, candidate may fade in your estimation.

Be objective. Consider the job to be done, as well as the skills and qualifications that being successful requires. Do your candidates have these skills and qualifications? What would it take for your candidates to be considered fully qualified for the position?

Don’t allow yourself to be unduly influenced by your candidates’ looks, bubbly personalities, high-priced hairstyles, or fashion-forward clothing ensembles. None of these characteristics can tell you how well your candidates will actually perform the job. The facts are present for you to see in your candidates’ résumés, interview notes, and reference checks. If you stick to the facts, you can still go wrong, but the chances are diminished.

One more thing: Diversity in hiring is positive for any organization. Check your bias at the door.

Trusting your gut

Sometimes you’re faced with a decision between two equally qualified candidates, or with a decision about a candidate who is marginal but shows promise. In such cases, you have weighed all the objective data and given the analytical side of your being free rein, but you still have no clear winner. What do you do in this kind of situation?

Listen to yourself. Although two candidates may seem equal in skills and abilities, do you have a feeling that one is better suited to the job? If so, go with it. As much as you may want your hiring decision to be as objective as possible, whenever you introduce the human element into the decision-making process, a certain amount of subjectivity is naturally present.

In reality, rarely are two candidates equally qualified, although often one or more people seem to have more to bring to the job than anticipated (for example, industry focus, fresh ideas, previous contacts, and so forth). This is again where your pre-work can be so valuable in keeping you focused. Can they both do the job? If so, the bonus traits can tip the scale.

Other options:

• Give them each a nonpaid assignment and see how they do.
• Try them each on a paid project.

Keep in touch with other top candidates as additional needs arise or in case your first choice doesn’t work out.

Revisiting the candidate pool

What do you do if, heaven forbid, you can’t hire anyone from your group of winners? This unfortunate occurrence is a tough call, but no one said hiring is an easy task. Take a look at your stack of potential winners. What would it take to make your top potential winners into winners? If the answer is as simple as a training course or two, then give these candidates serious consideration — with the understanding that you can schedule the necessary training soon after hiring. Perhaps a candidate just needs a little more experience before moving into the ranks of the winners. You can make a judgment call on whether you feel that someone’s current experience is sufficient until that person gains the experience you’re looking for. If not, you may want to keep looking for the right candidate. After all, this person may be working with you for a long time — waiting for the best candidate only makes sense.

If you’re forced to go to your group of almost-winners and no candidate really seems up to the task, don’t hire someone simply to fill the position. If you do, you’re probably making a big mistake. Hiring employees is far easier than unhiring them. The damage that an inappropriate hire can wreak — on co-workers, your customers, and your organization (not to mention the person you hired) — can take years and a considerable amount of money to undo. Not only that, but it can be a big pain in your neck! Other options are to redefine the job, reevaluate other current employees, or hire on a temporary basis to see whether a risky hire works out.