To Find Better Employees Stop Looking at Hiring as a Skill

Nicholas Klisht — December 5, 2016 Follow @nklisht

It’s easy to see why we think that hiring is a skill. You’ve interviewed candidates for hundreds of jobs. After making good and bad decisions, we begin to make better decisions. After all, when it doesn’t work, it wasn’t the candidates’ skill or a gap with their background you missed, it was a “fit” issue.

You’re an expert because you’ve spent 10,000 hours interviewing candidates for jobs right?

Using Malcom Gladwell’s assertion about expertise, it takes 10,000 hours for anyone to become an expert. It wouldn’t take that long to become a hiring expert, right? Five years, if you spent 38 hours every week interviewing candidates. It’s a skill worth having, one that has a major impact on your business and your team.

You don’t have time for that.

As a matter of fact, you don’t have time to spend even 15 hours a week over ten years to become an expert in hiring. To be an expert, you would need to hire 10,000 candidates after a one hour interview. Maybe it’s just 5000 candidates with an hour of reviewing their resumes and checking references.

It’s still not realistic.

If you can’t become an expert, there are alternatives. You could turn to expert recruiters. Ones that have hired 10,000 candidates and know how to select the right candidate. But that could run a small business thousands and thousands of dollars.

What about something else?

What about building a system? A system: “A set of principles or procedures, where, something is done”. A hiring system or process helps by ensuring consistent steps are taken, the best actions are repeated and issues can be identified. Like a factory, a set of parts go in and a manufactured car comes out. Step-by-step a car is built. Breaking the hiring process into a set of repeated steps to come to a final conclusion.

Sounds cold right?

A system shouldn’t be cold, it should be unique. A unique hiring process represents your brand. It calls out your values and your mission. It’s a unique process for your business. A system can help with evaluating what works and what doesn’t work. This is because every step can be measured and evaluated.

When I was managing a multimillion dollar online app implementation, I was frustrated by the design process at first. I hated that there was a copy deck separate from the user interface design. At first this was annoying, but as the project went on I realized this helped us focus. Focus on one piece of the project, to perfect it on its own and then perfect it when it was combined.

A hiring process helps you perfect the steps.

A process helps to break through our unconscious biases. Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Steps in a process can ensure we don’t bring these biases into the process at all. For example, if your process stated that you would do a 5-minute interview, every candidate that met 6-7 different qualifications wouldn’t include your biases in at all. At least not until after you interviewed all candidates.

A hiring process can help separate the good hiring practices from the bad. It can save time because a set of steps help with the decision process. It will help you become an expert in making hiring decisions.

Interested in creating a hiring process? Learn the three fundamentals needed in any hiring process that will help you find amazing candidates and select fantastic employees. Join our free webinar to learn the 3 Steps to Find and Hire the Amazing Talent You Need (Click Here To Reserve Your Spot).

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