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3 Ways to Reduce Risk When Hiring

In my experience, there are two major risks when making a new hire;

Number one , you decide that the new hire isn’t a good fit for the business or number two the new hire decides that you’re not a good fit for them!

It’s expensive to make the wrong hiring decision (the REC estimate over £100,000 per hire!) so here’s my advice to make sure that when you do hire, it’s a good fit for everyone.

The first step is to consider where you’re finding potential candidates. If you have a limited number of candidates to consider then you will end up compromising more.

Many businesses rely on online advertising, which may be great for companies with a strong brand or to target ‘ active ‘ candidates but relying on a single approach means that you are missing out on around 75% of the available candidates in the market.

As well as advertising, aim to implement a compelling internal referral scheme and partner with a specialist recruitment agency that has a proven track record for the position that you’re trying to fill.

Secondly, spend time to really define the role in detail and set clear expectations from the outset.

When I speak to a candidate that is looking to leave a job after just 3-6 months, most of the time it’s because they feel that the role was mis-sold to them. The role that was advertised and talked about in the interview is very different to the role that they end up doing on a daily basis.

They’ll talk about goal posts being been moved, the role changing almost immediately upon joining and that there was a lack of training and support.

This can easily be avoided by making sure that you’re clear not only on the position itself but also about your expectations for the first 6-12 months.

My third tip would be, make sure you nail down the interview process.

Recognise that everyone in your business may not be an expert interviewer. As hard as this may be to admit, I’ve seen C-Level employees conduct terrible interviews. Interviewing is a skill and it’s something that takes preparation and practice.

If you can, try to include more than one person from your company in each interview, dividing the responsibilities gives both strong and weak interviewers the chance to ask questions and increases the chances that the right questions will be asked.

And finally, aim for a level of standardisation in your interview process, this comes back to the good planning. Although you may want to keep quite a casual feel to your interviews, you should be asking similar questions to each candidate so that you can benchmark their answers and can make a fair comparison when it comes to making a decision.

There clearly isn’t a silver bullet to ensure hiring success but taking into account these 3 steps will reduce the risk and help ensure you make a great hire!

About the Author

David Ellery is the Director of Ripple Recruit, an Engineering and IT recruitment agency in Reading. David has been helping candidates and companies for over a decade. You can reach David on david@ripplerecruit.co.uk – feel free to get in touch to find out more .