Let’s face it: everyone wants to hire top talent for their team. After all, employee turnover is costly, both in terms of monetary expenditures and morale and productivity. It’s estimated that the costs associated with turning over a single employee are, in many cases, equivalent to half of the employee’s annual salary. The financial burden of turnover isn’t always the most damaging part of losing an employee, however. Hiring the wrong employees is often detrimental to themorale— and subsequently, the productivity– of the entire team.
So, how can you be sure that you’re hiring right the first time? Consider the following tips for top talent acquisition:
1. Have a solid understanding of your business. You can’t possibly know what type of talent you need for your company if you don’t first have a solid understanding of what your company is all about. Your job posting, after all, should reflect your company’s mission and values. In fact, a well-articulated posting that accurately reflects your organization is the first step in attracting top talent.
2. Look for a culture fit. Often, hiring managers fixate on finding candidates with the right skills and experience. While these factors are certainly important, it’s also essential to remember that job skills can be taught– even during the on-boarding process. What can’t be taught, however, are the personalities and behaviors that make a candidate a good fit for your company’s culture. Paying attention to these intangibles, then, is a way to help ensure you’re hiring the right fit for your team– not just the candidate with the most impressive resume.
3. Research top candidates. Once you’ve narrowed down your pool of resumes to your top few candidates, it’s time to do some research and vetting. Truthfully, a candidate’s resume may or may not be an accurate depiction of who she is as an employee; it’s been estimated that up to 80 percent of resumes are at least somewhat embellished.
So, do your due diligence and spend some time researching your frontrunners. Social media is an obvious place to begin. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can likely give you some insight into a candidate that a resume can’t provide. Contact references and ask open-ended questions that allow them to formulate their own impressions of the candidate, rather than soliciting yes-or-no responses.
4. Use the interview to your advantage. How a candidate presents on paper or even via a phone conversation is not always congruous with how he presents in person. Use an in-person interview to your advantage. While a candidate’s responses to your questions are important, so are other less obvious factors, like body language and attitude. For example, a candidate can easily list an adjective like team player on his resume, but does he present himself as someone who interacts harmoniously with teammates? Trust your instincts when deciding whether or not someone is a good match for your organization.
5. Be easily accessible. In today’s social media-driven world, it’s important for competitive employers to be easily accessible to top candidates. When your company is a desirable place to work, news spreads quickly, and top-notch candidates will seek you out. So, it’s important to make sure they don’t have to dig around to find you. Make your contact information easily accessible in a number of places, including your LinkedIn profile, your company website, and your business’s Facebook page, for starters. These are also excellent places to show off your company culture and attract new candidates.