Your Hiring Nightmares: Avoid Them

Hiring the right candidate for the job is important from the start. It doesn’t take long for a bad hire to affect the entire office and the best solution is prevention. You can save money and time by reevaluating the entire hiring process and eliminating flaws. Here are three unconventional tips that can help you determine the right candidate from the start.

  1. Ask for a joke. Cover letters are boring and typically don’t really provide much insight into the candidate to begin with. One off-the-wall hiring tip is to ask candidates to send you a joke with their resume rather than a cover letter. You will be able to immediately eliminate any candidate who skips this request as someone who doesn’t follow directions. You will also be able to see which candidates can practice restraint. Anyone who sends an off color or offensive joke can be rejected. This will leave you with candidates who truly make you laugh and if they can do that on paper imagine that they may be a great fit to work with you and your team.
  2. Raise their objections. Don’t wait for a candidate to see the work style and office culture after several weeks and decide it isn’t a fit for them. Be honest and up front. The first step is to meet with your current team and discuss the office culture. Put together a list of all the things that might be a little out of the ordinary and may make the more conventional applicants uninterested in the job. Then put these in your ad. You may not get as many applications but you’ll know the ones who do apply are genuinely interested.
  3. Don’t dominate the interview. It is easy to fall into the trap of explaining the job, the company culture, and the business all in great detail. Let the candidate do more of this work. A good candidate is going to prepare for the interview by researching the company before they arrive. Let them tell you what they found instead. The longer you keep them talking the more likely they will deviate from their prepared statements and relax into their true personalities. Now you can evaluate the real them not the selves they prepared for the interview.

Don’t let your bad hire cost your company money. Contact the recruiters at CornerStone Staffing for more information!  

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