 When people are your biggest asset, it’s so disappointing when you get them wrong. It drains resources, is time consuming and stressful.
Doing your due diligence on candidates, in an effective way, before hiring them, is absolutely essential if you want to avoid heart sinking mistakes. I liken the process of recruiting someone to buying a house. Here’s my analogy.
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 When people are your biggest asset, it’s so disappointing when you get them wrong. It drains resources, is time consuming and stressful.
The cost of hiring the wrong person is generally calculated to be 30% of first year salary plus the more intangible costs of reduced productivity, team morale, training, rehiring etc. What a waste.  The smart first step to hiring a new team member is working out what the requirements for a job are, and which related skills and attributes candidates must possess to be successful.
But don’t get carried away  Will they work through their lunch break?
This is a question I was asked recently by a small business owner. I know this guy well and he’s not the sort of manager to dump piles of work on his staff and expect them to stay until it’s all done.  I recently organised a follow up meeting with someone I’d met at a networking group. Nothing unusual about this, I know, but I was particularly excited as she was based in Manchester which is a new area for me to develop contacts and relationships.
My natural instinct, as an experienced interviewer, is to start off asking someone about themselves and their business so this is how we began.  Yesterday, I learned some interesting things about Generation Z (18-25 year olds).
Who would have known?!  ‘We want to do it better’
This is what many clients say to me at the start of our working relationship. ‘We’re haphazard, unstructured and not really very good at recruiting the right people, in fact we find it quite stressful’. They realise things could be done differently and more effectively but can’t quite put their finger on what needs to change.  Having a structured recruitment process in place helps filter out unsuitable candidates before they’ve taken up much of your time.
 We’ve just become proud owners of a new car. Well new to us. Nothing fancy, but it gets us from A to B nicely and comfortably. It’s a lovely upgrade from our previous 15 year old, faithful family car. That, had electric windows that didn’t go back up, a sat nav that had a very annoying beep that didn’t turn off and a music system that only did radio.
 I was having a conversation with someone yesterday who has a job interview next week. He was doing a lot of the talking and was, in my opinion, scarily verbose. I was thinking to myself, what a challenging interview his would be to conduct and am hoping that his interviewer is well trained and experienced in controlling and keeping interviews to time. Otherwise this interview is going to be a record breaker!
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