You may feel like there’s too much here to try to do everything we recommend the next time you hire. We recommend you do as much as you can. If you have to start somewhere, and have to pick just one thing, develop behavioral interview questions. Then use those when you interview each candidate.

Then, next time, do better phone screens, and ask two or three of your directs to conduct interviews similar to yours using your predetermined behavioral interview questions. Next time, add the Interview Results Capture Meeting.

All that said, you can do all of this the next time you hire. No, you won’t be great at any of it, but you’ll learn fast. And if you interview two, three, or four people, when you’re done you’ll be a hell of a lot better hiring manager than 95% of the managers in the world.

The first few times you use this Manager Tools Effective Hiring Process, conduct a hotwash to review what went well and what you need to take a look at to make it better next time. If you don’t know how to do a hotwash—also called an After Action Review or AAR, There’s a Cast for That™.

Hiring is the most important managerial practice.