In this one, Konstanty Sliwowski, the founder of Caissa Global Recruitment, talks about how to make the hiring process smoother and result-oriented. Efficient executive recruitment starts with identifying the need to hire in the first place. He, then, explains how, by asking simple but important questions, and save yourself from poor recruitment.
This is what he discussed:
Why are you hiring? Do you need to hire? These may seem like basic questions but they are often overlooked. Before asking what skills you are looking to hire for, you first need to understand what triggered the need to make a hire in the first place.
- Maybe the team is understaffed to complete a task properly or on time.
- Maybe a task requires specialized skills that no one on the team has.
- Maybe somebody just resigned making all of the above valid.
Typical hiring practices tend to skip this step and start with what you are looking for in a new hire. This is a mistake.
Reflecting on why you need to hire is crucial to your ultimate success and is key to designing the right job description and hiring format. Without reflection, you ultimately miss asking some fundamental questions.
By not engaging with strategic thinking and difficult questions upfront, you are left guessing at the real root cause of your problems, or worse, being unaware of them. When the right questions are not asked, there is little likelihood you will find the answers you need.
It is not in the nature of most people to ask questions that cannot be easily answered. If diagnosing the cause of project failure is complicated and difficult, it is easier to not ask the tough questions and move on instead of having a retrospective (painful as it may be). If benchmarking your open position against other jobs and employers in the job market is a difficult task, maybe it is easier to not do it and just make some assumptions.
This invariably causes problems down the line that:
- Prolong hiring processes
- Result in interviewing the wrong candidates
- Attracting the wrong people
- Having offers rejected
- Making the wrong hire
All of this can be avoided by asking the right questions early on and understanding why you are currently hiring.
To get a list of some of the questions you should be asking before you begin to specify the role comment below and I will send them across to you.
So some of the questions that are missed include:
- Is this hiring process the result of a people problem or a process problem?
- Could the current team handle the work if the work was organized differently?
- Could the outcome be better if the staff had the right tools, training, or workflow?
- If someone quits the job, did they leave because of unclear or unrealistic goals, process problems, or poor job design? Or did other employers simply offer better opportunities?
- If someone was fired from the job, was it because of a flaw in the hiring process, or a problem in how they were trained and managed?
- Perhaps the issue is job design. What aspects of the work environment set people up for success or failure?
- Are other external factors at work? Are other organizations experiencing similar challenges in this type of role?
Why these questions for Hiring Managers go unasked:
- Some of these questions are uncomfortable. It’s much easier and more optimistic to assume that the right new hire can solve these problems.
- Hiring managers are usually willing, but rarely eager to question their role in a hiring failure.
- Without market research capability, most organizations find it difficult to compare their situation to other organizations.
In sum, for a good, result-oriented hiring interview, you must:
- Start with identifying the root cause. Why are you hiring in the first place?
- Reflect the need for hiring. It helps in designing the right hiring format.
- Ask the right questions upfront. No matter how complicated the scenario is, the right question always helps in finding the right candidate.
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