$12,500 – $19,000. That’s how much you lose for every wrong hire, excluding salaries.

Almost certainly, the salaries of the employees constitute a large phttp://enablegroupasia.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/hiring-the-right-person.pngortion in any businesses’ accounting books. Business owners, and partners alike, knows how important this operating cost is to the company but not all companies have a process to safeguard this investment by hiring the right employees when they really should.

Some businesses choose to outsource the work partial/full process to external parties, while some may choose to do it themselves. If you are the latter, here are a few key areas for you to ask yourselves before diving into your recruitment process.

Know Who You Really Want

In any type of serious purchases, you don’t buy it with vague images of the items. You certainly don’t describe a car purchase with simply, 4 wheels and a steering, or a house using a roof and rectangular in shape.

Having an image of the perfect employee will help greatly in the assessment during the interviews. Having a checklist to that image is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this.  The following points reinforces this checklist and we hope you will get value out of it.

Specify the Job

• • Skill Based Hiring
    What specific skills does this role require? How does it need to change and evolve over the next few years? Will this role lead the employee into management?

• • • Department Based
      How much skill overlap does the candidate have with the current department? What is the level of diversification that needs to be managed in the department if the applicant joins? Does the current department manager have experience managing members with similar portfolio before? How did that turn out like?
    • Company Suitability
      How quickly can the candidate integrate into the company’s culture? Will the candidate be able to do well with the resources (technology, market niche, admin support etc) that the company provides? If the applicant came from an environment that has more resources, will the applicant be able to still do exceedingly well with lesser.

Get the Right Interviewer(s) for the Right Interviews

It is probably more important to have the right assessors than the right assessment techniques. Involving the wrong people in the hiring process do more than just selecting the wrong candidate, it may end in rejecting the right one. For example; weak managers may tend to rate highly on weak candidates who are weak in the same way they are or rate poor on strong candidates because of the difference.

The best assessors are familiar with the range of experience and skills needed for the role but are self-confident enough about themselves in the company to accept a strong(er) candidate when spotted.

Interviewing Techniques

Conducting a proper interview is a lot harder than most would think, just like choosing your Outfit-Of-The-Day, or more affectionately know as OOTD, you should do so with structure in mind. There are many different techniques and in practice most employers deploy a hybrid of them. We picked up a few for your reading convenience.

• • Behavioural/Situational
    Behavioural or situational questioning is one of the most common technique wittingly, or unwittingly, deployed by interviewers. It focuses on past performances to benchmark against current hypothetical situations. Interviewers tend to rely this assessment on the basis that behaviours can be consistent over time.The questions in such interviews can look like this;“How did you overcome the challenges faced in that last project and what processes did you change to avoid similar issues from recurring in future projects?”
  • Informational
    Asking for information and/or experiences about a field or job can get you acquainted with the topics of their function very quickly, making your next interview more informed and sharper.The questions in such interviews can look like this;“What do you think are the most important characteristics needed in order to fulfil this role well”
  • Task or Testing Interview
    Giving the candidate problem solving exercises is another way to assess their skills (mentioned in point 2a above), sometimes adding a presentation segment into the exercise can help revealing the future work synergy where they may have to submit proposals and communicate ideas across the organizations.

In Summary

Hiring as an employer is as much work as the candidate’s efforts. It takes two hands to clap in order for a match to be made and it certainly isn’t the easiest issue to tackle in running a company. At eNable, we have seen and advised many of our current clients during the pre & post covid situation on their hires and helped many of them avoid hiring pitfalls as well.

ABOUT ENABLE CONSULTING

Established in 2013, enable Consulting is a specialised HR solutions provider for small and medium-sized enterprises.

We believe that having a strong and robust HR function is a key driver for continuous growth in any successful business. It is on this belief that we have built many successful partnerships with clients across different industries.

We are a people business and it is our talent pool that defines us. Each and every one of our consultants is highly professional with many years of experience in HR management and services.

Our Consultants are PMC certified to further be able to help local SMEs improve and optimise their HR operational efficiency through Singapore Grants. enable is about offering affordable, high value adding solutions to improve business performance; while at the same time nurturing and inspiring a fair and respectful working environment. But above all, enable is about enabling you.

Contact us for a non-obligatory Q&A consultation today