Hiring and training new employees is one the largest expense that a business has to contend with. The total cost for employee turn over includes costs associated with: recruiting efforts, screening of applicants, wages paid for management and personnel officials to take part in interviews and training, paying for a replacement employee to fill the position during the search and during training of the new employee, wages for the trainer, and costs associated with lower productivity rates during the six months it takes for a new employee to work up to speed. These costs usually result in an expense equal to 18 months salary of the position being filled. This statistic clearly demonstrates the need to hire the right person for the job and your company the first time around. To find the right person for the job you will need to go through a series of easy steps to recruit the right employee.

Step One: Evaluate Your Needs

The first step in finding the best employee for the open position is to determine what your needs for the position are, and how you want to rank candidate qualifications and attributes. For example you will want to use a job description or make a list of qualities that the job requires, and you will then need to add any qualities that the applicant will need in order to fit in with your company’s culture. I.E. if your company is formal and values punctuality and efficiency you will not want to hire someone that arrives to the interview late, dressed casually, and that is disorganized. When you have your expanded list of qualifications and personal attributes that you want in an applicant you will then want to reduce this list to the minimum standards that you will be willing to except. For example, the previous employee may have had an MBA, and was a CPA, however, the position really does not require the worker to be a Certified Public Accountant, but they do need a Master’s level grasp of accounting and financial management skills. You will want to write down all of the minimum skills needed: Masters degree in Accounting or related field, financial management experience, and knowledge of spreadsheets and data bases. Since this is the list that you will be using to draft advertisements you will want to reduce the minimum skills as much as possible. Perhaps make two lists, one to be used in your job opening advertisements, and one to use during screening of applicants and interviewing potential employees.

When these two lists are completed, list the qualifications and skills in the order of their importance with the qualification that is absolutely needed at the top, to recommended qualifications at the bottom of the list. The purpose of ordering the list is to make sure that applicants have the qualifications that are essential, and to help you decide what qualifications to use in your ads. You can take the top two or three to place in print with the others remaining on the list to use when screening applications.

Advertise and Recruit

There are several ways you can recruit new talent:

1. Hire a headhunter,
2. Use an employment agency,
3. Work with a local or state job service,
4. Advertise in local newspaper,
5. Advertise on television,
6. Advertise in other cities,
7. Post notices on job boards and job search websites, and
8. Post a notice in-house.

To get the most responses, a combination of several of these options is probably the best idea.

In order to maximize the benefits of your adverting and recruitment budget, you should design recruitment tools to use to attract talent: a short two a three line ad, a job description, and a "skills and qualifications" list. These tools will help you relay to newspapers, job service intake personnel, and other vendors what exactly it is that you are looking for. Your ads, job descriptions, and skills lists should only use minimum standards that you are looking for. This tactic will not only save you money on advertisement rates, but it will also help to attract a greater selection of applicants.

After you have your recruitment tools composed and refined you should start by placing ads in free resources such as state and local job services, bulletin boards, websites that offer free job posting, post signs at local colleges and grocery stores, or where ever is appropriate for the type of job that you are trying to fill. After saturating free advertising locations, you will then need to place fee advertisements based on your recruitment budget. If your budget is small try to maximize your advertising dollar by placing ads in the Sunday edition of your local newspaper. The Sunday edition of most newspapers has the largest readership count of any day so you will be increasing your chances that a qualified applicant will read and respond to your ad.

Selecting Prospects to Interview

After placing your ads it should only take a couple of days before applications will start to pour in. It is a good idea to review each application as it comes in, if practical and sort into Yes, No, and Maybe piles. The Yes pile should be applicants that have all of the minimum qualifications that you are looking for, the No pile will have none of the qualifications that you are looking for, and the Maybe pile will have at least some of the qualifications that you are looking for.

Depending on the number of respondents, or your company’s policy, it is best to start calling people back and set up initial interviews as soon as possible to ensure that qualified candidates are still available. First contact the applicants in the Yes pile and set up an interview on a specific date . Don’t be ambiguous about when the interview can be, instead select one or two days and allow applicants to select time slots on one of those days. This will help condense the amount of disruption the interview process will have on your company, and it will minimize the expense related to paying the salary of a manager to sit in on an interview instead of doing more important aspects of their job. Depending on the depths of interviews that you are planning to give, you should probably estimate that a first interview will last about 15 minutes. Schedule interviews in half-hour increments so that you, and other personnel involved, can review the applicant’s responses and jot down notes before the next applicant arrives for their interview.

Even though the Maybe pile applicants don’t have all the qualifications you want, don’t discard them yet as circumstances may lead you to consider them later. Keep Maybe’s on stand-by in case all of the Yes’s fail to meet your expectations. For the No pile, if you are sure that you don’t want to consider them, send out a form letter letting them know you have not selected them to interview. This will help eliminate unwanted calls from applicants wanting to know about the status of their application.

Dear _____,

Thank you for applying for the XX position. We received many highly qualified applicants and have narrowed our search to only a few people. Unfortunately your application was not selected. Best wishes with your job search.

Sincerely,

Your name

Position

The Interview Process

The interview process is a critical time for you to get to know the applicant. It is really not a time to go over their basic qualifications, as you can accomplish that by reading their resume. The purpose of the interview is to see what kind of person and employee the applicant is. To accomplish this you will want to ask questions that give you an idea of:

• what kind of personality they have,
• what their work ethics are, and
• if you will want to work with this person.

Prepare a list of questions ahead of time and print out enough copies so that all of the personnel involved in the interview each have a copy of the questions for every interview scheduled. This will help you ask every applicant the same questions, to get the same amount and kind of information from every applicant, and have a place to organize your impressions and notes about each applicant’s answers.

After getting an idea of who the applicant is, you can move on to asking questions that are directly related to specific needs of the job: software hardware, typing speed, 10 key speed, certifications, etc. If there special duties that the job requires, this is the time to find out if the applicant is capable of, or willing to do them. For example if extensive travel by car is required, make sure that the applicant is willing to travel, that they have a car, and that they are able to drive.

To wrap up the interview ask:

1. What was their best and worst work experience?
2. Why did they leave their last job?
3. When are they available to start?

Make sure to take notes about the answers each applicant made, and also note their body language, their appearance (casual or business), and their personalities.

A second purpose of the interview is to weed out bad employees. By bad I mean employees who will cause problems within your company because of combative personalities, sloth, and unprofessionalism. To avoid hiring these kinds of employees look for the following warning signs:

1. They have been laid off before, but say they weren’t given a reason for being fired or laid off.
2. They are unable to substantiate training with proof, i.e. a certificate, letter of reference, etc…
3. They take a long time to answer questions.
4. They break eye contact continuously.
5. They are avoidant about talking about their past employers or jobs.

The final step of the interviewing process is to verify references and review the information that you gathered.

Selecting the Right Person For the Job and Your Company

After the interviews are completed and you have verified references and experience, take some time to discuss the pros and cons of each applicant. Take especial note of personal impressions about how well each applicant would fit in and be able to function within your company. After all, personality conflicts will impair your company’s productivity as much as the applicant’s qualifications.

Questions To Ask Yourself About the Applicants

1. Will this applicant be able to work within the organizational culture of my company?
2. Does the applicant have the people skills needed for the position?
3. Does the applicant have all of the qualifications this position requires? If not, do they have the most important qualifications?
4. How does this applicant compare to other applicants?

Score your answers to each of these questions and then compare applicant scores. This process should help you determine which applicant is the right candidate for both the position and for your company.